The 1990s were really the heydey for wonderful but not-quite-convincing space skirmishes. We used to see tons of ships flying around our screen, often too many to count. Unlike Battlestar Galactica's quick cuts and weird handheld camera footage, these 1990s space wars were usually filmed with an unflinching eye or a slow pan, letting you see every computer-generated line and explosion.

And it's totally awesome.

You can compare these massive space shoot-outs to video games, but it's not entirely accurate — because the absolute best of these TV shoot-em-ups have more sensory overload, and you can't even imagine trying to interact with them. (I have seen a few video game cut scenes that approach this level of overload though.) You get ships flying in every possible direction, or a hundred individual starships on screen at once, and all you can do is sit there and drool. It doesn't look real, but your imagination fills in the gaps, which only makes it better.

That's really the key — these space battles are super elaborate and over the top, and that helps them draw on your imagination.

Remember when you used to imagine what a whole fleet of Federation and Klingon Starships flying into battle would look like? And then Star Trek: Deep Space Nine finally gave it to us, and it was completely unreal looking, yet amazing:

It wasn't really until the 1990s when you could have tons of ships flying in formation, like these SA-43 Hammerheads from Space: Above And Beyond:

Possibly my favorite 1990s CG space battles came from Babyon 5, however. They were even cheaper looking than Trek's battles, but even more ambitious. Look how much stuff they pack into every frame of these battles. And every penny they don't have for CG effects is more than made up for by the conviction of the actors:

For people who grew up on space battles as shown on the original Trek, Space: 1999, Blake's 7 or even the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, these dogfights are revelatory. If space battles in the late 1970s and 1980s were all about trying to match the dog-fighting feel of Star Wars, then 1990s space battles were all about massive fleets going at it, sustaining massive casualties and fighting on. And yes, the massive casualties are a big part of why these battles rock so hard — you don't ever quite believe that each of those Federation starships has hundreds of crewmembers aboard, dying every time there's another flare on your screen, but it's still kind of horrifying and exciting to think so.

It really is all about suspension of disbelief — these battles ask more suspension of disbelief from you, but they give more back as well.

Here's some amazing battle footage, showing crowds of ships swarming, in this snippet from Andromeda as well. (Skip the first minute or so of this video):

And some awe-inspiring Farscape action:

And then there's Doctor Who's fake but oh-so-lovely Dalek fleet:

I suspect that we'll see a wave of nostalgia for these 1990s-style fleet-on-fleet battles, one of these days. Just like today, geeks feel nostalgic for guns that went "pew-pew-pew" and models roaring around fake starfields, in another decade everyone will be discovering the beauty of computer-generated space mayhem.

For now, though, the only place you can get this kind of star-fighting (in the United States, anyway) is on Syfy:

Note: This is not a history of novelizations of existing movies or TV shows — just original novels and story collections set in those worlds. And for the sake of sanity, we're not going to touch on non-SF tie-ins like the amazing Shaft and Starsky And Hutch novels of the 1970s. (Even though Starsky And Hutch: Kill Huggie Bear and Shaft Among The Jews have pride of place on my shelves.)

Also, I'm not even going to pretend this covers every tie-in novel ever published. Feel free to chime in in comments with stuff I've missed!

The early years:

Doctor Who didn't get its own tie-in novels until the early 1990s (although there were annuals that included short fiction published almost ever year from 1964 through to the show's cancellation in the late 1980s.)

But Who's 1960s rival The Avengers had a slew of books. Berkeley-Medallion put out nine books, including The Moon Express and The Magnetic Man, both by Norman Daniels. And star Patrick Macnee himself co-authored two novels for Hodder and Stoughton: Deadline and Dead Duck. The 1960s also saw a ton of novels based on Get Smart, Man From Uncle and Mission Impossible, over in the U.S.

There were also a handful of novels tying in with The Prisoner — most notably, Thomas M. Disch wrote a Prisoner book called The Prisoner, in which Number Six finally tracks down Number One — and she's a female robot whose hand falls off. Hank Stine also wrote a demented novel called The Prisoner: A Day In The Life, in which Number Six falls through a succession of loopy, acid-trip realities designed to undermine his sense of self.

Fawcett also put out one novel tying in with the 1970s TV show The Invisible Man, called simply The Invisible Man by Michael Jahn.

Jahn also wrote one of a half dozen Six Million Dollar Man novels that Warner Bros. put out in the mid-1970s. The Six Million Dollar Man, of course, was based on an original novel series, Cyborg by Martin Caidin, but the television show was drastically different and the later novels had more in common with Lee Majors' portrayal than anything from the original books. (Update: Jahn wrote to us and explained: "I wrote five "Six Million Dollar Man" books (one under the name Evan Richards), not just one, and about 15 other tie-ins including "The Invisible Man" book that you know about. The pseudonym was required because Caidin was afraid he was losing Steve Austin to me, which is a bizarre concept.")

But probably the most significant stand-alone media tie-in of the 1970s, in retrospect, was the Star Wars novel Splinter Of The Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. Splinter quickly became non-canonical thanks to its climactic battle scene in which Luke manages to lop off Darth Vader's arm — not to mention its incestuous embrace between Luke and his sister Leia. According to some reports, Foster wrote Splinter to be a low-budget sequel to the original movie in case it bombed — hence the fact that it reuses many props and sets from the first film, and avoids ambitious locations. It also doesn't feature Han Solo, because they didn't think his character was going to catch on. Han Solo did get to star in his own trilogy of novels as consolation, though, starting with Han Solo At Stars End There were also a handful of Lando Calrissian novels.

The rise of Star Trek novels:

According to the excellent book Voyages Of The Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion by Jeff Ayers, the first original Star Trek novel was 1968's Mission To Horatius, a young adult novel by Mack Reynolds. But the best known early Trek novel was the second, 1970's Spock Must Die! by James Blish, who also wrote adaptations of the original series. Spock Must Die!, which I totally read as a kid, involves an accident which produces two Spocks — and only one of them can be allowed to go on living.

In the 1970s, Bantam put out a series of original Star Trek story anthologies called The New Voyages,, plus a dozen original novels, edited by famed science fiction author Frederik Pohl.

The golden age of Trek novels, though, was probably the 1980s, with David Hartwell editing the Trek line for Pocket Books. Vonda McIntyre, who also did incredible novelizations for Star Treks II, III and IV, wrote two great books: The Entropy Effect in 1981 (ignore the horrible cover) and Enterprise: The First Adventure in 1990 (which would be a good counterpoint to the recent J.J. Abrams film in terms of showing how the crew got their start.) In this interview, McIntyre explains why she identifies with Sulu, and how she gave him his first name: Hikaru. (The publisher freaked out, until someone actually asked Gene Roddenberry and George Takei, who were both fine with it. But you have to wonder what Takei thought of Sulu's porn stache. Probably he didn't mind it.)

Another great author who wrote a couple of memorable Trek books was John M. Ford, who vastly expanded our understanding of Klingon culture in How Much For Just The Planet? and The FInal Reflection. (Ford also wrote Klingon manuals for the Trek role playing game, and was always treated as an honored guest at Klingon gatherings. At the 2009 Worldcon, a panel about the late Ford included a moving tribute from a Klingon audience member.)

Meanwhile, Diane Duane did more than any other author to flesh out both Vulcan and Romulan society, with 1984's My Enemy, My Ally and 1988's Spock's World, among others. The Romulans — who call themselves the Rihannsu in Duane's version — have never seemed as fully realized or believable as a culture on screen as they have in Duane's books.

According to Ayers' book, however, all was not well with the Trek novels — Gene Roddenberry wanted to micro-manage the book line and had his personal assistant, Richard Arnold, read every single book. And Arnold tended to balk at anything that went beyond what had been established on screen. If you want to read a hair-raising account of what it was like to write a Trek book that ran into trouble with Roddenberry or Paramount, here's writer Margaret Bonnano's incredibly lengthy account of her troubles writing the tie-in book that became PROBE. Shorter version: tons of micromanaging, characters being cut out, and calls for Bonnano to rewrite the whole thing in six days.

Other franchises to get tie-in novels in the 1980s included Battlestar Galactica — most of those books were novelizations of episodes, but eventually it looks like they ran out of episodes to adapt and started writing original volumes; and Blake's 7, which got a sequel novel called Afterlife. (There was also a horrendously poorly received B7 novel in the 1990s called Avon: A Terrible Aspect, written by actor Paul Darrow.) And of course, as we detailed in a recent post there were 16 great V novels, which continued the story after the original show went off the air.

Early 1990s: Star Wars and Doctor Who

Two other media juggernauts that had never had a credible presence in the tie-in novel market suddenly started producing in the early 1990s.

Star Wars launched an ambitious series of books set after the events of Return Of The Jedi, with Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, which followed the exploits of Admiral Thrawn and also the fate of Luke, Leia and Leia's kids. These were the beginning of the Expanded Universe books, which tied in explicitly with the video games and comics, and often seemed to be canonical unless explicitly contradicted by the movies. Eventually, the Expanded Universe gave us a new alien menace to fight the descendants of the Jedi: the monstrous Yuuzhan Vong.

And once the Star Wars prequels were out, we saw more books and other tie-ins set in the era long before the original series — the Old Republic novels take place an an era long before the prequels, when the Jedi were plentiful and kept peace throughout the galaxy. Meanwhile, other series of novels take place during the Clone Wars, like Karen Traviss' amazing Republic Commando/Imperial Commando novels, and still others expand the stories of Han Solo's kids Jaina Solo and Jacen Solo.

The really breathtaking thing about the Expanded Universe novels, starting with the Zahn books, is the fact that they're the only continuation after Return Of The Jedi we've got. Most people, in George Lucas' shoes, would have insisted that only they should be allowed to tell the authoritative story of what happens to Luke, Leia and Han Solo after the third movie of the trilogy — but Lucas seems to be totally content with letting the novels be the final word on those characters' fates, reserving for himself the right to go back and annotate the stuff that happened before Luke came of age in increasing detail. At times, it feels like Lucas' Star Wars movies and Clone Wars cartoons are occupying the space that's normally reserved for tie-in novels — filling in backstory — while the tie-ins forge ahead answering the question, "What happens next?"

These days, it seems like a month doesn't go by without at least one or two new Star Wars novels coming out, from the Fate Of The Jedi series to the more esoteric volumes, like the zombie tale Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber.

Meanwhile, after Doctor Who went off the air in 1989, Virgin Publishing got the rights to do a series of novels that were "too broad and deep for the small screen." The New Adventures line was launched, with an odd mix of books ranging from John Peel's bland fanfic to Paul Cornell's bizarre, Vertigo Comics-influenced metafictional odysseys. At their best, the New Adventures were daring, loopy and sacrilegious — and several authors contributed to the line who later wrote for the TV series, including Cornell, Gareth Roberts and Russell T. Davies himself. There was also a lot more explicit sexuality and racy content in these books than the original show had allowed.

Unlike the Star Wars novels, the New Adventures novels don't tell the official story of what happens to the Doctor after the series ends — I'm pretty sure the new TV show has already contradicted them in many particulars. But what the New Adventures books do instead is something just as awesome — they vastly expand our understanding of the Doctor, and give him a new pathos as well as a terrible, Prospero-ish puppetmaster sensibility. Building on little hints from the TV show, the novels give us a Doctor who's much more complex and much more tormented than we ever realized — and also more fallible, on occasion. You could not look at the eternally childish traveler in time and space the same way after reading a slew of these books — and the new reinvention of the show in recent years has built on that reimagining.

The Doctor Who novels are still being published — but after the 1996 TV movie, the BBC took them in house and toned them down considerably. And after the new series came on the air in 2005, they've become much more kid-oriented.

All in all, the twin early 1990s phenomena of the post-ROTJ Star Wars novels and the Doctor Who: New Adventures novels pointed to a greater potential for tie-in novels to be something more ambitious than the simple "adventure too minor to televise" format that book publishers had mostly stuck to. (With a few notable exceptions, like the Duane Star Trek books in the 1980s.) At the same time, Trek books were stretching their horizons a bit, with Peter David's sweeping Troi-Riker romance Imzadi gaining critical acclaim beyond what a usual tie-in novel would expect. If tie-in novels became big business in the 1980s, they came of age in the 1990s.

The mid-1990s: every big series gets tie-in books

By the mid-1990s, tie-in novels seemed to be pretty standard for most TV shows and some movie series as well. There were mostly forgettable novels tying in with Predator, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Alias, Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, The X-Files, Xena, the BSG reboot, and various other media properties. There were a host of authors who would churn out novels connected to Charmed, Buffy or whatever, like Keith R.A. DeCandido, Christopher Golden, K.W. Jeter, Peter David and Kevin J. Anderson. Two or three women wrote a slew of Star Trek books under the pseudonym L.A. Graf, which reportedly stands for "Let's All Get Rich And Famous."

And of course, William Shatner started writing his own Kirk fanfic with 1995's The Ashes Of Eden, with generous contributions from Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens.

The other interesting thing that happened in the late 1990s was the rise of novels based on comics — Byron Preiss put out a series of novels based on Marvel Comics' characters, and there was a well-received anthology of Batman short stories. Here's a fairly lengthy list of Marvel tie-in novels — the best of the bunch is probably the Incredible Hulk novel What Savage Beast by Peter David, which tells the story of what David would have done if Marvel hadn't 86ed his plans for the Hulk in his comics run. It brings back the Hulk's evil alternate self from the future, the Maestro, as well as an army of Hulks from alternate universes.

Babylon 5 also put out a bunch of tie-in novels, and from 1996 onwards creator J. Michael Straczynski was closely involved in the novel line, working to ensure a great deal of consistency with the television show. Gregory Keyes, Peter David and Jeanne Cavelos, in particular, put out a handful of B5 books each that were considered not just canonical, but essential. Cavelos' The Shadow Within has been reprinted a few times, and Dreamwatch Magazine called it "one of the best tie-in novels ever written."

Spin-offs, video-game novels and name authors:

The biggest development of the past decade has been the rise of spin-offs and tangents from established series — David has given us a series of Star Trek novels, The New Frontier, that follow a mostly new set of characters in a sector of space that no Trek ever visited before. The TNF books simultaneously play with tons of obscure Trek references — including characters from the animated series — but at the same time they color far, far outside the lines. With their weird hermaphrodite pregnancies, married captains, and above all their obsession with the dynastic politics of an obscure alien empire, the TNF books often feel like David's own space-opera/soap-opera series, only loosely connected to Trek.

Trek has also given us another spin-off, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers books by DeCandido. Meanwhile, Star Wars has given us the Jedi Academy books and the aforementioned Republic/Imperial Commando books.

And then there are the video-game books, which started as a trickle 15 years ago and are now accounting for a large and larger share of bookstore shelf space. The first Doom novel, Knee Deep In The Dead, came out in 1995, and was followed by several others. The Halo book series started with 2001's The Fall Of Reach by Eric Nylund. Nowadays, many TV shows don't feel the need to put out novels — where's our Fringe book series? — but every successful video game gets a ton of novels, without fail.

And that leads to the other big development of the past decade or so — bigger authors turning to tie-in novels to try and make some extra cash or win new fans, or just have fun with a beloved icon. Greg Bear surprised some fans by announcing he was working on a Halo novel, a sequel to Fall Of Reach. Tobias Buckell also wrote a Halo novel, 2008's The Cole Protocol. Jeff VanderMeer wrote a Predator novel, South China Sea, also published in 2008. And of course, Michael Moorcock surprised everybody by announcing he was doing a Doctor Who novel.

Some professional writers are alarmed at the growth of sharecropping novels, where authors dabble in characters they didn't create for media conglomerates that keep most of the profits. But they're a growing slice of the publishing world — and at this point, you can't claim it's impossible to create meaningful, groundbreaking work in the tie-in novel world. As a whole, tie-in books may look like a shower of drek — but they've helped expand our understanding of some of science fiction's most iconic characters, and — perhaps — helped those big media properties become more interesting and thoughtful along the way.

Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

Spock
Died: Sacrificing himself by bringing the warp engines back online at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, leading to his dying from exposure to radiation.
Undied: His body was resurrected in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock thanks to the Deus Ex Machina powers of the Genesis Planet, and it turned out that his soul had lived on all along thanks to mind melding with Bones.
Cause of Undeath: Mind-meld and blatant plot ridiculousness in order to keep the fans happy. Admittedly, it was all set up in Star Trek II, but still.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, his soul was alive the entire time in Bones, but his body had enough time to go through a funeral and being shot off into space, so... 50/50? But not really, let's face it.

Ellen Tigh
Died: Poisoned by her husband after (in his eyes) betraying humanity in "Exodus, Part II" at the start of Battlestar Galactica's third season.
Undied: Instantly downloaded into a new body as part of the Fifth Cylon retcon, as revealed in the fourth season's "Sometimes A Great Notion."
Cause of Undeath: Traditional cylon download/rebirth.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, she was instantly reborn, which suggests that she was never actually dead as such, but the whole Fifth Cylon thing muddies the waters... especially when she was reborn as someone who wasn't exactly the Ellen she was when she died. We're going with "Kinda, but not really."

Boba Fett
Died: Falling into the Sarlacc's mouth in Return Of The Jedi.
Undied: Climbing back out of the Sarlacc's mouth in comic sequel Star Wars: Dark Empire.
Cause of Undeath: He was swallowed by apparently never chewed or digested and climbed his way out, apparently.
Does It Count As Death?: If you believe Dark Empire, not in the slightest. George Lucas apparently disagrees, however; it's said that he edited Fett's last appearance in the special edition of Return Of The Jedi to make it clearer that it's meant to be the end of the character.

John Sheridan
Died: Avoiding certain death by nuclear explosion at the end of Babylon 5's third season finale, "Z'ha'dum," by jumping into a pit so deep that it was impossible to survive. Oh, and then there was that nuclear explosion, which presumably would've destroyed the pit and everything within it anyway.
Undied: At the start of the show's fourth season, Sheridan was revealed to be in a limbo between life and death because of his love for Delenn. With the help of - and 20 years worth of lifeforce from - helpful fellow limbo-ite Lorien, he comes back to the land of the living.
Cause of Undeath: As Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting would say, choosing life. Who knew it was that simple?
Does It Count As Death?: Nope. Think of it as getting as far as death's foyer, before deciding to turn back because you'd changed your mind.

Tasha Yar
Died: Wanting out of her Starfleet contract early, Denise Crosby got her character killed at the hands of a gloopy, ooky oil monster in the first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation "Skin of Evil."
Undied: Thanks to time travel shenanigans, turns out never to have died in the alternate timeline of third season episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," and then manages to return to the past of the original timeline at the end of the episode in a way that still doesn't make a lot of sense.
Cause of Undeath: Alternate timelines having prevented her from dying in the first place.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, a Tasha Yar definitely died. In fact, as we learn upon the appearance of the second Yar's daughter Sela, the other Tasha was killed unsuccessfully trying to escape from the Romulans, so it looks as if any and all Tashas would end up dead one way or another.

Superman
Died: At the hands of the apparently unstoppable Doomsday in 1993's The Death of Superman storyline.
Undied: Midway through the follow-on The Return of Superman storyline, when it's been revealed that none of the four characters who've taken up the mantle are the real thing.
Cause of Undeath: He woke up. No, really; the audience is pretty much told that he'd never died in the first place, he'd just gone into superhibernation in order to heal from the fight.
Does It Count As Death?: Not at all, but it definitely counted as a moneyspinner for DC Comics, who went on to kill Green Arrow and Green Lantern within the next couple of years, as well as teasing deaths for the Flash and breaking Batman's back.

Bucky
Died: Trapped on a bomb that mentor and Nazi-fighting partner Captain America had managed to jump off of before it exploded, as explained way back in 1963's Avengers series.
Undied: In 2005's "Winter Soldier" storyline of Captain America, where he got reintroduced and prepped to become the new Captain America in 2007.
Cause of Undeath: Turns out that Bucky was, in fact, blown to bits by the exploding bomb... It's just that they were pretty large bits. Large enough to rebuild him into a brainwashed no-good commie assassin who gets put on ice between missions, until he meets Cap, goes rogue, remembers who he is, and then uses his mighty Russian technology for the good of American mankind.
Does It Count As Death?: What's brainwashed Russian assassin for no?

The Flash
Died: Which one? Barry Allen died in 1985's Crisis On Infinite Earths. Wally West disappeared and was, at various times, presumed dead/missing/no-one could make up their mind in 2004's Infinite Crisis, and Bart Allen kicked the bucket in 2007's The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #13.
Undied: Wally came back in 2007's Justice League of America #10, Barry in 2008's Final Crisis #1 and Bart in 2009's Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #4.
Cause of Undeath: Both Barry and Wally had, it turns out, never died. Barry had been swallowed into the Speed Force, which is the cosmic... thing... that gives all super-speed characters their powers in the DC Universe, while Wally's fate was ultimately (after a couple of failed attempts that were quickly contradicted) decided upon a variation of "He took his family on vacation to an alien planet and didn't tell anyone." Don't ask. Bart, meanwhile, did die, kind of... but his teenage self was trapped in a futuristic lightning rod and then magically released in the 31st century to fight Superboy Prime. Again, it's probably better if you didn't ask.
Does It Count As Death?: No question for either Barry or Wally (No), but Bart... I have no idea. I've read Legion of Three Worlds multiple times, and still don't understand the explanation that's given there; let's just never mention it again and pretend it didn't happen.

Jason Todd
Died: As the result of a real-life phone vote to see if Todd, the second Robin (as in Batman and), should be killed at the hands of the Joker. Seriously, 1988's comic industry, what the hell were you thinking?
Undied: 2004's Batman revealed that Todd was not only not dead, but had magically aged more than most other characters in the DC Universe in his off-panel absence.
Cause of Undeath: Superboy was punching the walls of reality, and things went a bit weird. You know how it is with these superheroes and their punching the walls of reality; history gets rewritten all over the place. Just be glad that Batman didn't end up as Batdinosaur. Although, now that we think about it, that'd be awesome.
Does It Count As Death?: Magically contradicting Schrodinger and his cat, Jason Todd both did and didn't die. His official history has it that he died, and then just came back to life thanks to the punching of reality, meaning that he was still alive. So, while it ultimately doesn't count as permanent death, there was a death in there somewhere.

Jean Grey
Died: In 1980's famous Uncanny X-Men #137, where she sacrifices herself for the good of the universe to stop herself from becoming overwhelmed by the godlike power she possessed that might lead her to eat a couple of planets if she got peckish.
Undied: It's revealed in 1986's Fantastic Four #286 that the Jean Grey who killed herself was never actually Jean Grey at all, but the Phoenix force, who's been cosmically imprinted with Jean's personality. Don't worry; the Phoenix force was already back by that point anyway.
Cause of Undeath: Jean hadn't died (at that point), and the resurrection of the Phoenix force was somewhat implied by the name - The official explanation was that the Phoenix force hadn't actually died either, just lain dormant until someone else (Jean's daughter from an alternate timeline. If you don't already know, don't ask) claimed it.
Does It Count As Death?: Before the retcon and ruined Chris Claremont's X-Men once and for all you bastards, it did. Now? No-one died until years later, when Jean really got the Phoenix power and then ended up dying anyway. Guess there's something unlucky about the name or something.

Actually, my absolute favorite of all time has to be this weird sequence from Futureworld, with the red ninjas, and the bondage, and the sexy, sexy gunslinger action:

If you can explain to me exactly what that dream about Yul Brynner symbolizes, I'll buy you your own lifesize Yul Brynner gunslinger robot.

Even though science fiction often strives to portray bizarre or other-worldly things happening in our "real" world, it often reaches for the most jagged tool in a film-maker's kit: the dream sequence, in which things are practically required to get loopy and unreal. Some creators — like, say, David Lynch and Joss Whedon — love the dream sequence more than others. But it pops up surprisingly often. With the melty faces, and the people falling in space, and the weird animal costumes, among other things...

Here are 40 or so dream sequences that we love, divided up by era...

1920s through 1970s (Or if you want to view it in a non-gallery format, click here.)

1980s. (Or if you prefer a non-gallery format, click here.)

1990s. (Or, for non-gallery format, click here.)

2000s. (And it's available as a non-gallery page, here.)

I wouldn't dream of claiming that we included every amazing SF dream sequence, ever. So what are your favorites? What did we miss?

Sources: UGO, Wikipedia, FinestFive and IMDB, among others.

It's the classic trade-off: on the one hand, self-contained weekly episodes are newbie-friendly and easy to show in reruns, because it doesn't matter what order you show them in. On the other hand, how deep can your characters and universe really get when nothing ever changes and the situations get fully resolved within 43 minutes?

You probably already know the story of how television shows got arced: It used to be that every show was like the original Star Trek, with a neat resolution (and, usually, forced laughter by the main cast) at the end of each episode. And then shows like Blake's 7, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (among others) experimented with having more long-running storylines even as individual episodes usually told a standalone story. At last, we ended up with shows like Lost, where an individual episode may just add one tiny pebble to the overall zen rock garden, with no resolution whatsoever. And yet, some shows are still stubbornly episodic, and others try to find a balance between long-term storytelling and singleton episodes.

Really, every show finds a balance — even shows that land really far one end or the other. Nobody is doing pure arcs, nobody is really doing 1960s-style interchangeable episodes any more.

And yet that balance shifts constantly, for individual shows as well as for the television landscape as a whole. Almost any time you hear television showrunners being candid about their arguments with the networks over the direction of their shows, the standalone-vs-arc thing comes up. Watch the unaired pilot of Dollhouse, and you'll see a show that's setting out a ton of long-term storylines in its first hour — but Fox wanted Joss Whedon to deliver a half-dozen episodes that anyone could watch cold, without knowing anything about the show. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles got renewed for a second season, but only on the condition that most of the episodes would stand on their own — hence the wall of messages written in blood, each leading to a different adventure. And according to Wikipedia, one reason Robert Hewitt Wolfe left Andromeda was because the network wanted more self-contained episodes and less mythology. There are hundreds more stories like that.

Some viewers complain about story arcs because they're hard to follow and you have to trust the show's producers not to drop the ball. It's like that trust exercise where you fall and someone catches you — except that you fall, and hope that two years later, someone will still be there to catch you. You trust that the clues and questions dropped in season two will get paid off or explained in season four — and that there will be a season four.

Really, though, both arc-based storytelling and episodic storytelling can lend themselves to tremendous laziness. Bad arc storytelling can consist of nothing but random wheel spinning, pointless melodrama and random "clues" being tossed out, to keep the juggernaut chugging along. Bad episodic storytelling can consist of cookie-cutter plots, the "rinse, repeat" syndrome, and "monster/artifact/whatever of the week." But really, anything can be done badly — even if it could also be done incredibly well.

On the other hand, whenever you hear about producers saying the network forced them to do more standalone episodes, the result is almost always a drop in the show's quality. That's not because standalone episodes aren't as good as complex arcs — it's just that standalone episodes done by creators who wish they were doing complex arcs instead are usually not as good. And often, the showrunners who are most eager to feature longer-running storylines are the ones whose shows are most prone to the "X of the week" problem. (See Dollhouse, Terminator, etc.)

The main point is that today's audiences are no longer willing to believe that someone can meet God, or battle a sentient nebula, or get tortured, or have space amnesia — and then never refer to those events again. An adventure isn't really even epic unless it leaves some mark on you.

On the other hand, there's only one thing worse than a standalone episode that leaves its heroes and universe completely unchanged: a whole, season-long storyline that ends... and then leaves its heroes and universe comopletely unchanged, and is never spoken of again.

Oh, and then there's the faux arc, where standalone episodes are gussied up with little clues here and there. One of my biggest pet peeves about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who was his habit of pretending he was doing more arc-based storytelling than he was actually doing. If the Doctor mentions the "Medusa Cascade" in random conversation half a dozen times, that doesn't make it an arc — just makes it clumsy foreshadowing.

One other generalization occurs to me: shows that offer complete resolution every week tend to be lighter, maybe even fluffier, than shows that draw out stories over months or years. A show that's totally content bringing up a problem and then sorting it out, with no loose ends, tends to be one that's bright and sunny simply by virtue of showing that problems have tidy solutions. A show that tries to show the consequences of decisions over time, and the psychological effects of events, will inevitably go much darker.

One last thought about arcs: they're usually (but not always) the hallmark of more complex, three-dimensional characters. But when those more complex characters get lost in layers of mystification and randomness (the sort of thing Josh Friedman was talking about in his guest post earlier today) then I'm not so sure that's a worthy tradeoff. But the most important thing is to tell a good story — whether it's just this week, or over five years.

Some people interpreted last week's top 10 list of silly alien prosthetics as hating on low-budget science fiction, or dissing the hard work of makeup artists — and that was definitely not the intention. But when you've seen the same few ideas crop up again and again, you tend to get a bit jaded.

For me, personally, Star Trek in the 1990s and early 2000s ruined me for boring humanoid aliens. After the endless parade of people in vinyl pajamas, with different smushy bits of latex on their faces every week, I got rubber-nose fatigue. There's a lot to love about 1990s Trek — Deep Space Nine was frequently brilliant and prescient, and Voyager had some standout episodes — but the infinite assembly of silly faces was not one of the things I loved.

Oh, and the picture above is from Davosmith's amazing Flickr set of Manchester's Fab Cafe. Here's another image from the same set, featuring another one of the creatures on this list:

So here are ten aliens that were obviously done on a shoestring budget, but which absolutely knock your space boots off:

10. The Daleks, on Doctor Who.

The evil genetically engineered cyborgs on Doctor Who are like mini-tanks with buzzing bee voices, and they scared the pants off generations of British (and some American) kids. They've had their ups and downs — if the first Dalek story you saw was "Day Of The Daleks," "Destiny Of The Daleks," "Remembrance Of The Daleks" or the recent one where they turn people into pigs and then dress in zoot suits, you won't understand what the fuss is about. Watch "Genesis Of The Daleks" or "Dalek." (Before you jump on me in comments, I do like "Remembrance," except the Daleks wobble horribly and look just decrepit.) In their prime, though, the Daleks glide along, rasping with anger and pointing their terrible egg-whisk guns. They're utterly cheap — and horrifying. And you only occasinally Runners up: debatable whether the Cybermen are aliens, but they do often look cool. Also, the Draconians and Zygons make the rubber-mask thing look brilliant, and the Forest of Cheem also doesn't look bad at all. I also like the Slitheen, but only design-wise.

9. The Aliens from The Arrival.

Directed by David "Pitch Black" Twohy, this 1996 alien invasion film was probably made for three Snickers wrappers and a handful of arcade tokens — but I really love the look of these aliens, and they way they move on their weird satyr-ish horse legs. Here's a slinky alien transforming itself into a hawt babe, probably because it just watched Species. Also, I love the flaps that cover up its brain, and how they undulate. Nice stuff!

8. The Visitors from V.

They look human most of the time, but when we get the occasional glimpse of their real lizard faces under their human masks, it's super-effective — as long as we don't linger. Here are a couple of choice moments. I love Diana picking at the shreds of her human disguise, like they're a scab (at about 4:00 in the first video). And the speech in the second video is the greatest thing ever:

7. Greedo and the other cantina aliens, in Star Wars.

Weirdly, later live-action Star Wars movies have never featured aliens that felt as interesting and lively as the first glimpse we got in that cantina scene. Of course, we've already exposited about our love for Greedo, but all of the quick glimpses of aliens in this scene have a liveliness that makes you feel like they're each the star of a cool story. Not bad for an underdog film with a tiny $8.5 million budget (not much even in 1977) whose crew was busy trashing the set and making fun of the Wookiee costume.

6. The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

They actually jumped out at me when I was compiling pics for the post about silly-looking facial prosthetics last week — there was a picture of a Vorta surrounded by Jem'Hadar troopers, and I had to crop the Jem'Hadar out of the image, because they actually looked kind of cool. Something about the way their prostheses work with their faces really feels realistic, and all of those scenes of them struggling with their addiction to ketracel white feel engaging rather than run-of-the-mill. Runner up: Species 8472 in Voyager had some moments of genuine creepitude as well.

5. Black Oil in The X-Files.

A sentient alien virus that can live in hibernation for thousands of years, it appears as a liquid, not unlike crude oil. But it can move on its own, and it's sentient, and it can take people over. There's nothing cheaper than just having some black goo oozing around, and yet it's completely convincing and compelling, and doesn't feel like any life form you've encountered on Earth.

4. The Aliens in District 9.

Obviously, this movie's still fresh in our minds, but the downtrodden aliens in the film look different than anything we'd already seen. Their twitching face-tentacles can't help grossing you out a bit, even as their big pleading eyes lay claim to your sympathy. With a budget of around $30 million, this film is the equivalent of Star Wars or Alien back in the day — a low-budget film that succeeds thanks to a lot of inventiveness born of desperation. And great storytelling, of course. I almost left this film off the list, because we've covered it so much lately, but it clearly belongs.

3. The Vorlon from Babylon 5.

These energy-based life forms are among the First Ones, and inspire a quasi-religious awe among people who see them. So its fitting that their headgear and robes look so alien and unfamiliar. As Sheridan tells Kosh at one point, he can't even tell if it's the same Vorlon under all that covering, or different Vorlons in the same guise.

2. The 456, on Torchwood.

To me, this is the absolute best way to do an alien species on a budget. Shroud it in toxic smoke — and mystery — and just show little glimpses of evil tentacles. The way these creatures shriek and spatter the walls of their enclosure with alien puke will stick in your mind long after you're done watching the miniseries "Children Of Earth." This official still is actually a better look at the 456 than we ever get in the actual television show — and even in this image, they're somewhat indistinct and obscene looking. They're the perfect mixture of mysterious and disgusting, just right for aliens who want to molest your children.

1. The Xenomorph, from Alien.

The studio originally only wanted to give director Ridley Scott a $4.2 million budget, until he showed them storyboards and Mobius illustrations. But, says Scott in a recent interview, "The [revised] budget started out at $.8.2-million and ended up at 8.6, which I think in those days was still relatively cheap. We didn't have the money to do pretty well anything... But in a funny kind of way, you get very clever when there is very little money, because it makes you think." Scott had a stroke of luck when writer Dan O'Bannon took him aside and showed him H.R. Giger's art "like he was showing me a dirty book," and they brought in Giger to design — and sculpt — the alien costume and other alien artifacts. But the other key, says Scott, was disguising the fact that this was still a man in a suit:

We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director said, ‘I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.' So he brought Bolaji Bodejo to the office, and he was actually from Somalia, funnily enough," Scott remarks, having much later directed BLACK HAWK DOWN, which was set in Somalia. "I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies,' and he said sure. And he became the alien. I had him for two months. In the cockpit, there's a pack of cigarettes that says ‘Bolaji.'

Thanks to Alan Bostick, Alasdair Stuart, Madeline Ashby, @Nightwyrm on Twitter, Marlin May, Andrea Zanin, Melinda Adams, Rina Weisman, Micky Shirley, Susie Kameny, Greta Christina, Serene Vannoy, Rus McLaughlin, Minal Hajratwala, Annelise Ophelian, Seth Kaufman, David Fraser, and James Limbach for suggestions!

Criminal Activity

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Involuntary time travel comes with plenty of disadvantages, not the least of which is finding yourself suddenly and unexpectedly naked without any money. Fortunately, the predestination paradox can be a handy survival tool. Time traveler Henry often finds himself sent to the same points in time and space as his younger self, and teaches him how to find clothing, pick locks, and steal wallets. It's sort of like illicit father-son bonding, just with himself.

The Joy of Sex

The Time Traveler's Wife: Another unexpected side effect of time travel is that a horny, adolescent Henry is every now and then confronted with a nearly equally young, equally horny duplicate of himself. This makes for some rather spectacular instances of masturbation, but it's really awkward when his father walks in on him.

—All You Zombies— by Robert Heinlein: The Unmarried Mother was an intersex, though apparently female, teenager who was seduced by a mysterious older man. Many years and a sex change later, she, now he, is sent back in time, where he meets and makes love to a very familiar girl.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold: Daniel Eakins is the sort of time traveler who throws caution to the wind, sampling all that time travel has to offer: foiling assassinations, visiting great moments in history, and using his knowledge of the future to bet on the ponies. So it's no wonder that when he meets up with the same- and opposite-sex versions of himself, he tends to get it on with them.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: When the alien nudists get a hold of the time travel code tattooed on Fry's rear end, they're mostly interested in stealing artifacts from 20th Century Earth, although they do at one point take a time out for Nudar-on-Nudar nookie.

How to Win a Fight

The Kid: Russel Dritz's dirtbag ways may go back to his childhood, when he was picked on by bullies and lost his mother to illness. When Rusty, his younger self, ambles into Russel's life, he finds there are some subtle ways that he can change the past. First on the agenda: Getting the kid into a boxing ring so he can learn how to throw a punch.

How to Become Rich and Powerful

Back to the Future, Part II: The 2015 version of Biff decides that all of his troubles would be solved his he had been extremely wealthy in the past. So he steals Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean and, with a 2015 sports almanac in hand, travels to 1955, when he gives the almanac to his younger self. And it seems to work: Biff is rich beyond his wildest dreams, he's quietly had his rival George McFly murdered, and he's married to George's now artificially-endowed widow Lorraine. Of course, it all goes to hell when that pesky Marty McFly appears on the scene.
Gargoyles "Vows:" In move that revealed the entire series as one big predestination paradox, David Xanatos travels back in time on his wedding day to give his younger self a collection of priceless gold coins, along with instructions on how to invest the proceeds from their sale. Is it cheating? Probably, but in Xanatos's mind, it makes him the very definition of a self-made man.

By His Bootstraps by Robert Heinlein: When Bob is pulled thirty thousand years into the future by a slightly older, though no wiser version of himself, he discovers that humans have become a primitive, compliant people. Diktor, a fellow native of the 20th Century, explains that a technologically advanced person could easily become king of these sheep-like folks, and gives Bob a list of 20th Century items to bring to the future. Bob complies, but travels to a point ten years before he meets Diktor. It takes Bob a shockingly long time to realize that he's in a Heinlein story and that he is himself Diktor.

How to Win the Girl of Your Dreams

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: Fry is distraught when Leela, the love of his life, is won over by an older and more mature stranger named Lars. When Lars is revealed to be Fry's older (and this time wiser) duplicate, Fry should probably recognize that he could woo Leela if only he'd successfully reign in his adolescent nature. But it being Fry, he fails to take the lesson to heart, and quickly moves on to another girl.

How to Travel Through Time

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter: In Baxter's sequel to H.G. Wells The Time Machine, we learn that the Time Traveller didn't build his device completely unaided. A mysterious benefactor gave the Traveller a sample of a radioactive substance to study, a substance that ultimately makes time travel possible. Of course, like all mysterious strangers in time travel stories, the Time Traveller's benefactor is, in fact, an older version of himself.

How to Save the World

Heroes "Five Years Gone:" One of the great things about the power to travel through time is that if you get that whole "save the world" business wrong the first time, you can just keep trying. And Hiro Nakamura has the added benefit of traveling through time to change events himself, and leaving instructions for his much less bad-ass past self.

Doctor Who "Time Crash:" The Doctor meets up with himself a great deal, if for no other reason than two or three or five Doctors are better than one. But sometimes it's just to ensure a little predestination paradox magic. The Fifth Doctor watches the Tenth Doctor create an artificial supernova that cancels out a giant hole in fabric of reality. Naturally, the Tenth Doctor only knows how to do this because he watched himself do it when he was the Fifth Doctor.

Doctor Who "The Parting of the Ways:" Rose Tyler gets her own predestination paradox going when she looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS gives her the power to transcend time and space, letting her leave the message "Bad Wolf" to herself in the past that ultimately lead Rose and the Doctor back to this time and place.

Teen Titans "Titans Tomorrow:" When the Teen Titans travel to the future, they're eager to see what they're like as adult superheroes. But the future is unexpectedly bleak, with many of the Titans turned to violence and destruction, tearing the United States in two and turning the Western half into a police state. Fortunately, the Titans are able to learn from their future selves what set these events in motion, and are able to prevent their dystopic future.

Babylon 5: To add another wrinkle in the predestination paradox, Jeffrey Sinclair finds that his entire life is being guided by his future self from the past. Sinclair eventually learns that he is the great Minbari historical figure Valen, and Sinclair must eventually travel back in time, become Valen, and write the prophesies that will guide Sinclair's life in the future. Fate, or proof that his talents transcend time and space?

Antennae
The Pathetic Rationalization: Snails are already kind of alien, right? They're French, which is like being from another planet. And you can sort of imagine them twitching — which they never do, since they're glued to a guy's forehead. But if you squint, they sort of twitch. And back in the day, there was something kind of meta about using a television with an antenna to watch a guy with an antenna on his head.
The Reality Check: Sadly, those are the only nice things we can say about the antennae. They're totally silly looking, and your head will hurt trying to imagine a species that evolved looking just like us, except for the funny antennae.

Weird Ears
The Pathetic Rationalization: They're sharp. They're classic. We wouldn't find Spock nearly as slashfic-worthy without them. And hey — maybe a lot of species just evolved with extra sensitive hearing because there were a TON of really quiet predators on their worlds? And the pointiness or crinkliness makes the ears extra-sensitive? You know it makes sense.
The Reality Check: Ummm... They're just glue-on fake ears. Actually, Spock gets a free pass, but everyone who's sported potstickers or omelettes stuck to their ears since then has no excuse. None. It's unoriginal and cheap-looking.

Corrugated Foreheads
The Pathetic Rationalization: When the Klingons first started getting knobbly on their heads back in 1979, it was a step above the weird engine-grease-on-face look they had before. And it's definitely a step towards putting the "oid" in "humanoid." And think about it — all of those lumps probably provide amazing protection against getting head-butted, or hit on the head with an anvil. Befitting a warrior species, really.
The Reality Check: So let's just give Klingons a pass, Why not? Trying to sort out their cranial discrepancies gives us something to do on long evenings (even with the Manny Coto retcon.) But everybody else who's gotten the cornfield-on-head thing has to find a new gimmick, stat. It's gotten so there's an infinitely diverse cosmos full of different head injuries. Trek is, of course, the worst offender — but by no means the only one. Let's just agree that a head blob is not a species marker.

Body Paint
The Pathetic Rationalization: Who would want to diss the green women? After all, they're a staple of science fiction, with their Shakespeare appropriating, sexy-dancing ways. And if it wasn't for greasepaint, how would we ever have learned not to hate the half-black, half-white people? Plus, it makes total sense: On other planets, the sunlight is probably harmful at other wavelengths besides UV, and so people need to have green pigment to protect themselves against the UltraLime rays. Right? Right?
The Reality Check: Okay, come on. Any alien whose face looks like a five-year-old who got to go to the face-painting tent at the county fair is not passing muster.

Extra Heads Or Limbs
The Pathetic Rationalization: We all love Zaphod Beeblebrox (and we were deeply saddened when the long-awaited movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy didn't even try to give us a proper, convincing two-headed President Zaphod.) And the book makes it clear the extra head and arm are just a prosthetic decoration that Zaphod decided to try out, so it's not strictly an alien biology thing anyway. Plus, why wouldn't humanoids have an extra redundant bit here or there?
The Reality Check: In practice, it just looks ridiculous — just look at the TV version of H2G2.

Random Mythological Drag
The Pathetic Rationalization: Oh wow. It turns out all our myths about Kali/Shiva/Santa Claus/Satan/Patient Zero are based on a real being, who visited our world at some point in a time when people were easily impressed by fake horns. Dude, it actually makes total sense. It's not just an alien who happens to look like Papa Smurf, it's the alien whom all the Papa Smurf legends are based on. Can you not see it?
The Reality Check: Cheap Devil costume looks cheap. Also, the aliens-gave-us-our-mythology storyline is almost as tired as the humans-visit-prehistoric-Earth-and-become-Adam-and-Eve thing. Mostly, though, it's just a cheap gimmick for recycling terrible Halloween costumes as aliens.

Funny Glasses/Weird Contact Lenses
The Pathetic Rationalization: Umm... well, maybe they're really kind of reptilian but they're disguised as humans, except for the eyes. See above, about UltraLime radiation — maybe you need weird eyes to see in UltraLime light. (Not to be confused with ultra-limelight.) Plus who doesn't love the alien who looks like us, until he takes off his Ray-Bans? Communists and Anti-syndicalists, mainly.
The Reality Check: Umm... contact lenses? Silly glasses? Is there any way for that not to look cheap and ridiculous? That's actually not a rhetorical question — we'd like to know.

Biker Gear
The Pathetic Rationalization: Okay, so it makes total sense for aliens to come to Earth disguised as bikers. Like maybe their physiology is really really different than ours, but they just put on leathers and helmets so they'll fit in. That totally makes sense. Also, if you think about it, motorcycle gear looks a lot like a spacesuit. I bet you never thought of that. It only just occurred to us, actually.
The Reality Check: There's really only one question that applies here: Is your alien named Lobo? No? Then you just lost your only justification for making him/her/it look like a biker. End of story. Seriously, it looks cheap.

Crazy Hair
The Pathetic Rationalization: Well, a lot of species evolve to look kind of similar, except that they don't evolve the same kind of styling foam we do. Or maybe the water on their planet is more impure, so shampoo doesn't work the same way it does here. Did you ever think about that?
The Reality Check: Okay, really? Silly hair? That's all you've got? Manic Panic is a gateway to a strange new world? Let's just agree that a little dab will not do a whole new species. Our personal favorites are Doctor Who's Movellans — granted, they're robots, but we're supposed to think they're aliens at first, and what makes them an alien species? Silver Bo Derek hair. Yay!

Baldness (with Optional Buttcrack Attachment)
The Pathetic Rationalization: Maybe this species never evolved hair? Plus, it totally makes sense, if you ponder all the totally bald people you know in your own life — they're all kind of aliens, aren't they? Their heads are so shiny! And have you ever noticed that a fully bald person can raise his/her eyebrows much higher than the rest of us? I witnessed a bald man's eyebrows hovering around the top of his head the other day. And if you ever meet a woman who's got zero hair on her head, it really is true that she's from a nymphomaniac species that kills with sex. It's not even a metaphor, it's just true. Follicles dampen your sex drive (in women, anyway.)
The Reality Check: This is the absolute worst. We can give you the elf-ears, the eventful foreheads, the snail feelers. But baldness? Really? Also, given how frequently bald aliens also have anuses on their heads... it's just not a good idea.

Seriously, VFX industry. You gave us Gollum. You gave us Spider-Man swinging through the city without looking arthritic or epileptic. You gave us Doug Jones. You even managed to make Kelsey Grammer-as-blue-furry-guy look kind of acceptable. What the hell?

His overarching theme: the importance of writing what you deeply care about. He explained that when he hires a writer, he is hiring that person's unique point of view, and that can only come from writing about your passions. He is interested in those that have a distinct voice and have something to say, and though there is no how-to book to develop those skills, the best advice is simply to trust your instincts.

As far as the writing process itself goes, the most important thing you can do is actually finish what you've started. As long as your work remains unfinished, it can't be judged, which might provide a rather cozy bubble but is not the best way to improve as a writer; he noted that spending five years working on a novel won't teach you anything beyond how to do that one thing, while spending that time publishing as many little things as you can will provide you with countless more opportunities to receive feedback and improve.

Once you have finished your work, the editing process will likely involve more subtraction and addition. Though some things may genuinely require further clarification, the editing process should generally see a shift from saying everything you can say to everything you want to say to everything you need to say. Editing an entire work also allows you the opportunity to take a larger perspective on a story's problems, as a faltering third act is likely the result of problems in the second.

Straczynski stressed that there really isn't any "correct" way to write, and it's up to the individual writer to find a system that works. This might mean improvising as you go or it might mean rigidly plotting everything out beforehand; either way, the most important thing is to write, and to write as many different things as possible. For instance, writing articles teaches you structure, which can then be applied to write better short stories, which in turn help you master dialogue, which helps lead to better scripts.

Failure is a key part of the writing process, because there's really no way to figure out where the boundaries and limits are, without occasionally overstepping the mark. He pointed out that those still in college have some of the best options for failure, as there are so many resources from the student paper to theater where you can try new things with none of the repercussions of spectacular failure that one might fear in the real world. Still, those in creative writing classes will likely have to be subversive in order to really progress as a writer, as Straczynski noted academia's reluctance to admit the value of works that could actually be, well, sold and published.

For those looking to take the first serious steps into the world of professional writing, he noted that literary agents, while not essential, can be hugely helpful. Since they in part act as gatekeepers for editors and publishers, their feedback can help hone your work into something publishers will really want to buy, and their recommendations of your work can make a huge difference when it comes time to choose which stories to publish.

Of course, with any professional success in writing comes the danger of ceaseless notes and senseless criticism from those that want your work to adhere to a strict formula. Straczynski noted that, while it can be frustrating to deal with those who simply want to place all stories inside the same box, there are really only two options: swim with the tide or against it. The best thing you can do is make all the changes you find unimportant while being prepared to stand up for those parts that really are too important to you to change. This give-and-take, while far from perfect, at least allows a more realistic chance of maintaining some measure of creative control.

Above all else, remaining true to your passions is what will lead to your best work and give you the best chance at success. Although in all of this there is the rather obvious factor of, well, talent, the fact remains that you have to be truly invested in what you're writing for it to have any power at all, and as long as that you keep that one notion firmly in mind the rest can be left to fall into place.

Star Trek: The Federation may have given us huge advances in transportation and energy-matter conversion, but their toilet technology is decidedly dull. The most advanced feature on the brig toilet seen in The Undiscovered Country is that it pops out of the wall. And, sadly, Federation loos are hardly immune to wear and tear; at one point during the Voyager's journey, the ship was down to a mere four functional lavs. And, if Jonathan Frakes is to be believed, the situation on the Enterprise-D is even more dire:

Galaxy Quest: In a bit of oversight, the creators of the non-existent television series Galaxy Quest failed to include even a single bathroom in the official blueprints for the NSEA Protector. Fortunately, a deleted scene reveals that, despite mistaking the TV episodes for actual historical documents, those ingenious Thermians recognized the need for mammalian waste extraction. It probably works, but by the time you figure out how, it would be far too late:

Dr. Lazarus - Galaxy Quest

Lexx: Off-beat space opera Lexx never shied away from toilet humor, so it figures that the ship's toilet would be, well, humorous. The titular living ship naturally has an organic lavatory, complete with a tongue, so you can finish your bowel movement with that fresh, just-licked-by-a-giant-space-bug clean feeling.

Babylon 5: The Babylon 5 space station plays host to a number of species, many with unique physiological properties. While human males can opt for the classic urinal, station toilets come equipped with attachments to accommodate other anatomies. As for species with more offensive excretory processes – such as the carrion-eating pak'ma'ra – they get their own facilities.

Firefly: As a general rule, everything on the smuggling ship Serenity is always breaking down, but the toilets seem to be the only things Kaylee isn't constantly repairing. Perhaps that's because they're the model of simplicity: sleeping-car style cans that, like the Federation brig toilets, pull out from the wall.

My Teacher Glows in the Dark by Bruce Coville: When Peter Thompson travels through space to meet with an interplanetary council, he discovers that the most difficult part of the mission may not be convincing the aliens not to destroy humanity, but figuring out how to use the facilities:

Give me the code for a bathroom, please," I said to the URAT.

"Insufficient data."

"What do you mean?" I cried, crossing my legs.

"I do not know what kind of bathroom you need. We have fifty-three different types of facilities."

I remembered the octopi toilets, or whatever they were, that I had seen on the first chart. Given the variety of aliens I had met already, it made sense that the ship needed a lot of different bathrooms.

"I'm glad I'm not the plumber for this place," I muttered.

"Yes," agreed the URAT, "that would be a disaster."

"Look, I don't need to be insulted by a machine. Just tell me how to find a bathroom!"

The URAT informed me that it needed to know more about me. After it had asked fifteen or twenty questions, some of them very personal, it finally gave me a bathroom code.

Not a moment too soon! I thought, as I punched the code into the control pad. I stepped into a bathroom that was only mildly odd – which is to say that it only took me about five minutes (five desperate minutes) to figure out how to use it.

Battlestar Galactica: The bathroom holds particular dramatic significance for BSG's doctor/Cylon collaborator/nymph squad prophet Gaius Baltar. It's where Laura Roslin asks him to be her vice president – and where she later threatens to hang his presidential portrait. It's also where he gets stared down by a supremely pissed-off (and audibly pissing) Starbuck. Of course, while the toilets in the Colonial Fleet seem to work, there's never enough toilet paper and the stall doors just won't stay closed.

Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams: The Starship Bistromath does away with the need for plumbing altogether. By placing the teleportation cubicles in the bathrooms, Slartibartfast has ensured that any toilet issues can be resolved by simply teleporting the offending substances elsewhere.

Star Kid: When Spencer Griffith finds an alien Cybersuit, the issue isn't whether the suit's functions (including one for waste collection) work, it's whether Spencer can think of the proper term for communicating his rather urgent needs to the suit's AI (starting at 9:58):

Writing for the Guardian newspaper, Wright bemoans the fact that Torchwood's third season is a five-part storyline instead of individual episodes:

I'm sorry, but what's so bad about five not-so-epic-but-nevertheless-carefully-crafted-individual stories shown over five weeks –or possibly even six if you need to re-jig the schedules because of a major sporting event? How did telly get so complicated?

Personally, I blame J Michael Straczynski. Back in the early 1990s, Straczynski, or JMS as fans know him, created Babylon 5. When it was first shown on Channel 4, it looked like a science-fiction series about a space station. The CGI was a bit shonky, but it passed the time.

Inexorably, though, it became clear that JMS, a control freak who wrote 92 of the show's 110 episodes himself, had an overarching vision. It involved a portentous brew of big themes – politics, destiny, war, peace, love. If you tried to start watching Babylon 5 with series three, you were left hopelessly confused.

B5 set a trend that was followed by Buffy, Battlestar Galactica and even Doctor Who, Wright argues, and soon continuing storyarcs ruled television and made it increasingly difficult for viewers to drop in and out of the show. I have to admit, I tend to like the larger storyarcs of shows like Lost and Fringe, but maybe that's my comic book background coming into play - shows without larger, ongoing, story threads seem weightless and brittle by comparison. Has the slow disappearance of the individual episode destroyed sci-fi TV for you?

Torchwood has succumbed to the story arc craze [Guardian.co.uk]

Space 1999
Perhaps understandably (The show's second season showrunner was a Trek veteran), Gerry Andersen's moonbase drama went from 2001-style cerebral sci-fi to Trek-esque adventure as it tried to avoid cancellation. In came an alien science officer, as well as a lot more action and even short skirts for the sexy female crew members, as the show tried to "Americanize" itself in order to win viewers... and each change made it that little bit more like original Trek. And, if you were a kid watching at the time, more than a little bit better.

Phoenix 5
Oh, to have been Australian and of television viewing age in 1970. Then, I could have seen Phoenix 5 instead of just reading about it on the internet and catching up with snippets on YouTube. Sure, the Phoenix 5 is no Enterprise - three crew members ("and their computeroid, Carl!") doesn't really allow for an endless supply of securitymen and interns to be killed - but look at those outfits and shitty special effects, and tell me that a mission to keep the peace in the 26th century isn't just a little bit ripped-off of Gene Rodenberry's dreams. Bonus points go to the show for having better theme music, as well:

Babylon 5
Yes, yes, I know; there are many Babylon fans who think that, not only is J. Michael Straczynski's television space opera epic not a Trek rip-off, but that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was actually ripped off of Straczynski's original Babylon pitch. Nevertheless, the intergalactic political backdrop of the show - and the visuals, especially the alien make-up - still strike me as strongly reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Albeit, in terms of the writing, perhaps handled better), and the epic scale of the story overreaches in the same way as the original Trek's best episodes as much as any of the admitted influences. "Rip-off" may be too strong a term, perhaps, but surely we can agree on "heavily influenced"?

(And this is where the flames start.)

Switchblade Honey
Warren Ellis' 2003 graphic novel may have started out as a joke, but it's one that stays funny throughout its short (72 pages) lifespan; essentially, "what if the Enterprise was crewed by bastards?", Honey apparently got its origins when an episode of Star Trek: Voyager made Ellis imagine a Trek where Ray Winstone was captain. The result? The kind of Star Trek that you'll never see on television, and that's a good thing.

Galaxy Quest
Sure, it's a Trek parody, which really protects it from being accused of being a rip-off. But by the end of the movie, when there's such a heartwarming message of self-empowerment that would make even Harve Bennett blush (not to mention all manner of technobabble and action), it somehow transcends parody and comes back around the other side as something more akin to... well, a Star Trek rip-off. That's the problem with affectionate parodies, sadly; they really just want to be loved by the things they should be making fun of... but it doesn't stop us from having a soft spot for this movie, anyway. Blame it on Alan Rickman.

Yes, the evil aliens in Decoys (and Decoys 2) mate by sticking their tentacles down a human male's throat and then impregnating him with their eggs. And for some reason they have to use their shapeshifting and telepathy to turn themselves into the guy's ultimate fantasy first - so he'll be really, really excited. And the mating must take place at sub-zero temperatures. Got it? Good.

The most awkward scenes of alien mating run the gamut from cheesy space-opera mating to full-on I-can't-believe-they-went-there porn. And yes, some of the clips below are not work-safe, so exercise discretion.

Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Trek, in all its various incarnations, has always been full of unfortunate alien mating moments. But for my money, this is the worst - it's actually the scene that inspired me to track down all the rest of these clips. Riker, blessed with the power of Q, decides to give Worf a Klingon girlfriend... who crawls around the Enterprise bridge in a Klingon aerobics instructor outfit. "Is this your idea of sex?" Geordi asks, awestruck. "This... is... sex!" Worf howls. Ummm. yeah.

Breeders:

Oh dear. An alien has been capturing women and attemting to mate with them. Here they are, in the alien's mental thrall, coating their naked bodies with its extraterrestrial sperm. And yes, it's NSFW:

Futurama:

Poor Dr. Zoidberg. His "erotic display" just doesn't turn out that well.

Weird Science:

In one episode of the short-lived TV series, their friend Chet starts dating an alien woman. Unfortunately, she wants to devour him after sex. Luckily, his ex-girlfriend intervenes just in time.

Babylon 5:

A similar mating practice crops up in this scene from B5's pilot. Commander Sinclair, he's a life-saver.

Space Thing:

An alien in human form, Col. Granilla, comes aboard a human spaceship commanded by women. It's up to this nice Kansas girl to teach him the ways of human mating. Clip is NSFW:

Something Is Out There:

Hand sex! Maryam D'Abo comes from an alien race who keep their erogenous zones in their hands. Here she is, getting it on with her boyfriend before their ship suffers a prison break. Clip is very work-safe, unless hand-sex offends you.

Quark:

This Star Trek spoof featured an episode where Ficus, the unemotional plant man (who's the counterpart of Mr. Spock) has to seduce Princess Libido, who's fallen in love with him. His objective is to use his sexual wiles to convince Libido to help him and his crewmates escape from her evil father. There's just one problem: Ficus doesn't have sex like normal people. He reproduces by pollinating. He's only too happy to show Libido how.

Species 2:

Eve, a clone of Sil, gets so excited she squishes a baseball. It's all because an astronaut, Patrick, has brought something alien back to Earth with him, and it manifests itself while he has sex with a debutante, and then her sister. The debutante suddenly gets very, very pregnant, while the sister notices that Patrick is growing rather a lot of tentacles during sex. Later, Patrick and Eve get together, and Eve's nipples grow tentacles, which I've never seen before. Clips are very, very NSFW:

Society:

Walking in on your parents having sex is bad enough — but what if you've learned your parents are aliens, who have sex by melting their flesh and blending together into weird and monstrous forms? And your sister is also an alien, and her head comes out of your mother's crotch? And asks you if you have any Oedipal fantasies? You might be put off sex for quite some time. This clip may actually be work safe, hard to say.

Inseminoid:

A human gets tied up and subjected to mating with an alien whose penis is a giant bong. This NSFW clip already featured as a "found footage," but I had to include it for completeness. Warning: very NSFW!

The Outer Limits:

Commenter Roklimber suggested this bizarre NSFW scene from a 1995 episode. Alyssa Milano is a nice college girl, until she gets hit with a spore from outer space. And then she suddenly wants to have sex with lots of guys... by absorbing them into herself.

Evil Aliens:

Nerdy Gavin finally gets to have sex with an alien woman, but finds out it's not all it's cracked up to be. And meanwhile, a woman named Foxy gets implanted with an alien fetus. And yes, it's NSFW.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Oh, and this post is probably work-safe, unless your coworkers are looking over your shoulders at the words on your screen. Or unless you start reading aloud. Some of the videos are a bit saucy, but they're from YouTube.

Tuvok (from Star Trek: Voyager):

Vulcans are automatically sex on legs, because of that whole repressed emotion thing, and the fact that it explodes - erupts! - every seven years with Pon Farr. But Tuvok is especially primed for slash fiction, because of all the smouldering glances he shared with Tom Paris and Chakotay, among others. Plus he's kind of an exhibitionist:


There's a whole web page devoted just to Tuvok slash fiction, with titles like, "Tuvok and Chakotay make a deal. But is it worth it?" Tuvok goes into Pon Farr a lot. There are even multiple stories of Tuvok hooking up with the mirror-universe Bashir, from Deep Space Nine. And Tuvok and Gul Dukat hooking up. Yay!

Jayne (from Firefly):

Jayne, you ignorant slut. For some reason, all of the men aboard the tiny ship Serenity are drawn to the manly brusqueness of the mercenary who would kill them for a nice hat. This Firefly Slash archive is full of Jayne/Mal, Jayne/Simon, Jayne/Mal/Simon. And there's more here. But no Jayne/Wash? Anyway, the Simon/Jayne pairings are surprisingly sweet and tender, with River giving Simon dating advice and Jayne admitting he really wants to turn the doctor out, instead of turning the doctor in. Here's a great passage from one story':

Simon arched his back, pushing up to meet Jayne's caress. His nails dug into Jayne's arm as he moaned low in his throat and shifted sinuously on the bed, spreading his legs wider. Jayne grinned down at him before taking his mouth again, his hand moving with delightful slowness, tongue stroking deep inside him, over and over, possessing without force. Simon gasped against Jayne's mouth, unable to summon any other response to this sure and gentle claiming.

His head felt like it was swathed in cotton and he stared dreamily as Jayne broke their kiss. Jayne watched him with a small, strange smile and nuzzled his cheek, making a satisfied noise under his breath. His hand tightened deliciously.

"Oh god," Simon gasped. "Yes, just like that!"

(Jayne pic from evinou)

Prowl (from Transformers Animated):

There have been a lot of Transformers named Prowl, but the latest version is a robot who turns into a police motorcycle. And for some reason, that's just unutterably sexy to a whole generation of slash-fic writers. Here's Prowl seducing Optimus Prime:

But Optimus a fast learner, and once he calmed, Prowl was quick to reward him. He turned his head inwards, placing careful, soft nips along the thin white plates of Optimus's jawline. So delicate-no wonder he wore the mask during battle. Removing a hand from Optimus's hip joint, Prowl ran it up the other mech's side, palm resting against the smooth curves of headlights as his fingers teased at the underseam of red chest plates. Optimus shuddered, whispering his approval in an unconscious reversion to a heavily accented, uniqe Cybertronian dialect that was so different from the formal, bland Cybertronian used by the Elite Guard.

And here's a debate about the Prowl/Jazz pairing, with links to some great stories. And here's a great essay on Transformers porn someone wants to see.

Miles Vorkosigan (from Lois McMaster Bujold's novels):

Miles Vorkosigan may have been pretty busy, rising above his tragic family life and his disability, to become one of the greatest heroes of ImpSec. But it turns out he's had lots of spare time to hook up with his handsome but dim-witted cousin Ivan Vorpatril, and his stepbrother, emperor Gregor Vorbarra. A treasure trove of Vorkosigan slash stories is here. And there are even more here. And there's the epic slash novel A Deeper Season, which you can read here.

Neroon (from Babylon 5):

Neroon is part of the warrior caste of the Minbari Star Riders clan, and a fearsome adversary. But he's also a legendary lover, especially when it comes to Marcus Cole, the human he fights in a deadly one-on-one battle. The two warriors come to respect each other and (in the minds of slash-fic writers, anyway) to embrace passionately. (Maybe that's why Marcus was a virgin for so long? He was waiting for the right guy to come along?) There are tons of Marcus/Neroon stories here, including this passage:

The feel of Neroon's warm lips caressing his caused Marcus to whimper, feeling the love that Neroon held for him.

"This is our first time together, Marcus. I would have it a memorable and pleasurable experience for you, my beloved."

Marcus bowed his head and then smiled shyly up at his husband. "I love you, Neroon and I will admit that I am nervous about tonight but I know that with you here beside me I can face anything. I want this, Neroon. I've waited all of my life for this moment. I love you, Neroon and I am ready for our first night together. One of which will be repeated for many years to come," Marcus said with a teasing smile as he leaned up and kissed his beloved.

Neroon growled low at the feel of his lover's lips against his as he took Marcus into his arms. Slowly he began to kiss his way down Marcus' neck causing Marcus to moan in pleasure at the feel of Neroon's lips across his skin. Slowly Neroon's hands removed the silk robe from Marcus' shoulders.

More here. And here.

Molly Millions (from Neuromancer):

Okay, so there are only a couple of stories about the heroine from William Gibson's Neuromancer, including a steamy hookup with 3Jane. But we want more! Someone write some, and send us the link.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars):

He may be kind of a dick, but at least the Jedi master is generous in bed. Around the time Phantom Menace came out, there was a craze for Obi-Wan/Darth Maul slash, showcasing how the Jedi and the Sith Lord could have worked out their antagonism. Here they are, dancing around together and trading longing glances:



But he's also hooked up with his teacher, Qui-Gon, his grown-up student, Anakin, and pretty much anyone else who comes by the Jedi temple.

Ford Prefect (from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy):

Ford Prefect shows Arthur Dent the wonders of the universe, but what else does he show him? And why exactly was Ford so eager to take Arthur with him when he fled the doomed Earth? Story synopses include "The Earth blows up, the boys get it on." Or: "Aliens force Ford and Arthur to have sex." Find out more here. And here. Ooh, and here. Oh, and if you're dying for pregnant Arthur Dent, try here.

Susan Calvin (from Asimov's Robot series):

There are only a few slash fic stories featuring Asimov's misanthropic heroine that I could find, but they come highly recommended.

Rodney McKay (from Stargate Atlantis):

Our favorite silly nerd character from Stargate has been keeping busy in the slash fiction world. Apparently there's a whole shipper community called McShep, for McKay and Sheppard. One story has the intriguing synopsis, "John and Rodney must refrain from having sex for twelve hours." In another story, "John gets caught with his hand in the Rodney jar." Oh my! More here. And here. And here. Ooh, and here's a video:

Aeryn Sun (from Farscape):

She may have had a tumultuous relationship with John Crichton on the TV series, but in the world of slash fic, she's gotten together with Zhaan, Chiana and a host of others. A typical passage:

Aeryn pressed her fingers over the nipples and began to manipulate them lightly, using the friction of the cloth to give Zhaan added pleasure. Letting go of the sensitive peaks, she slid her hands up over them. Zhaan's nipples traced circular patterns over Aeryn's palms. I'm going to make you mumble too, she thought, I won't be alone in that.

Zhaan arched her back, pushing her breasts into Aeryn's hands. Aeryn let go and pressed her own breasts into Zhaan's, pulling the priestess over for another deep kiss. As they slid together into the motions of the kiss, their tongues languidly caressing, their bodies moved closer, breast against breast, belly to belly, sex to sex.

The priestess nudged Aeryn back against the wall, still continuing to kiss her. Aeryn was melting—she was sure of it—the cold wall against her back, the warm woman in front, and every part in between aching for Zhaan's touch. Her hands stroked Zhaan's back, then moved lower, cupping her ass.

Dr. Leonard McCoy ("Bones") (Star Trek)
Kind of the obvious place to start, right? It's kind of hard to think of something to say about McCoy that hasn't already been said. He's probably the original Awesome Space Doctor, providing not only medical expertise to the Enterprise, but also being one-third of the trifecta that is Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. If Spock is the logic and Kirk is emotion, then McCoy is morality glue that holds it all together. (Morality glue?) Originally portrayed by DeForest Kelley, he will be played by Karl Urban in this summer's film.

Dr. Pieter Cross (Doctor Mid-Nite) (DC Comics)
Dr. Cross is actually the third DC hero to don the mantle of Doctor Mid-Nite, and like his predecessors, he a) can only see in pitch darkness, and b) is a doctor. Despite the fact that the chosen spelling of midnight looks like the name of a bad motel, it's a little refreshing, really, to have a superhero who uses the title of "doctor" and has the medical degree to back it up. Cross, in addition to his vigilante activities, still puts in a full day at the office and is always willing to take time to deal with a medical emergency. On top of that, he's the superhero community's physician of choice, having done everything from emergency surgery on Hourman to removing the Brainiac virus from Oracle to removing a bullet from Lois Lane to giving Power Girl her annual checkups. (I kid you not; Pieter Cross is a lucky man.)

Dr. Janet Frasier (Stargate SG-1)
Dr. Frasier is basically amazing. She is a compassionate physician and finds herself not only dealing with Earth diseases, but alien ones as well, as she treats extraterrestrial refugees. Over the course of the show, she adopts a daughter, Cassandra, an alien orphan.

Dr. Owen Harper (Torchwood)
Owen is the medical officer for Torchwood Three. He's kind of sarcastic, kind of abrasive, and eventually also kind of wonderful. He spends his spare time getting romantically entangled with both of his female coworkers, a female aviator from 1953, and, well, pretty much whoever else he happens to run across. In the show's second season, he dies, but gets better. Sort of. In that he essentially becomes the team's resident snarky zombie boy for the rest of his run.

Dr. Simon Tam (Firefly TV series, Serenity, 2005 film)
A brilliant young doctor (graduating in the top three percent of his class at the Medical Academy), Simon became a resident trauma surgeon in a major hospital and his future looked bright. That is, until he has to bust his sister out of the Academy, where she's being experimented on, escape, and join up with a less-than-savory crew that conducts less-than-legal business. Lucky for him, their business tends to keep his medical training pretty well in demand. (Plus, he's pretty much a shoe-in to win Best Dressed among the ship's crew. He owns some nice waistcoats.)

Dr. Carson Beckett (Stargate: Atlantis)
If there were a competition for Most Awesome Doctor On This List, chances are Beckett probably wouldn't win, although he might earn a few points for sharing a last name with an existentialist playwright. At the same time, he's a pretty competent physician and has the honor of being the only Scottish doctor on this list. He also probably holds the honor of having the most awkward character death on here, but at least he's back now. As a clone. Which is also kind of awkward.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
Maybe he's not exactly a certified physician, but you have admit that creating a living being out of a bunch of dead people is about as impressive as you can get when it comes to medical skill. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, however, Victor both fears and rejects his creation because of its ugliness. Way to be a pansy, man.

Dr. Thomas Elliot (Hush) (DC Comics)
He started out as Bruce Wayne's childhood friend, despite being kind of a nutjob of a kid, and went on to become a successful, Harvard-educated surgeon. Unfortunately, he eventually becomes the doctor of one Edward Nigma (The Riddler), which spells bad news, considering Elliot is the guy who tried to kill his parents as a kid (and half-succeeded) and now hates Bruce Wayne. Well, he and the Riddler realize they have that in common, and Dr. Elliot invents himself an alter-ego to work on the whole bringing-down-Batman plan. And thus, Hush is born.

Dr. Stephen Franklin (Babylon 5)
Dr. Franklin is the chief medical officer aboard the space station, and as Wikipedia describes him:

Dr. Franklin is a strong-willed, kind person and idealistic leader on Babylon 5; he is also a workaholic. He is not afraid to take risks to save a patient's life; this habit can occasionally get him into trouble. He has strong moral and ethical values, but he can also be self-righteous and a perfectionist at times.

And while those qualities make him kind of awesome, they also kind of make him addicted to stimulants in the show's third season. He, of course, beats the addiction and goes back to the awesome.

Dr. Miles Bennell (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 film)
The good doctor is called into town to look at the uncle of the cousin of his ex-sweetheart, who somehow seems not to be himself as of late. (This ex-sweetheart also seems to be able to call in some pretty convoluted favors.) Dr. Bennell is at first unable to find anything wrong, but a little more investigation leads him to discover the pod people, come to Earth to replace us. And, of course, snatch our bodies in the process-A fate which Bennell warns us of the last dramatic fourth-wall-breaking moments of the film. (The 2007 adaptation, The Invasion, features Daniel Craig as a doctor named Ben Driscoll. It unfortunately also features a bad movie.)

Dr. Sherman Cottle (Battlestar Galactica)
The Chief Medical Officer of Galactica, Dr. Cottle is also the only real physician-surgeon aboard. As the Battlestar Wiki describes him:

Cottle is somewhat eccentric and is considered a "bastard" among some of Galactica's crew, in addition to his penchant for being a heavy smoker, despite knowing the risks, and one not overly impressed by positions of power. He is, above all things, a healer. To him, nothing else really matters, be it rank, riches, or species.

Despite his somewhat abrasive manner, he's still well-trusted among the crew.

Dr. Samuel J. Loomis (Halloween franchise)
While its debatable whether or not the Halloween films are remotely science-fiction (although Michael Myers pretty inarguably displays some rather superhuman abilities), it's pretty safe to say that Dr. Loomis is just about the most awesome licensed psychiatrist in the business. After all, one of his main charges is more or less Unmitigated Evil. Then again, Loomis also doesn't have a great track record with keeping Michael from killing people. But he does get to say things like, "Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." And in Donald Pleasance's voice to boot.

Dr. Donald Blake (Thor, Marvel Comics)
Dr. Blake was Thor's original alter ego, having somewhat accidentally discovered the ability to transform into the god while on vacation in Scandanavia. Blake was a surgeon and while not being Thor, was actually seen practicing medicine in the comics. He is also said to have worked with Thor on multiple occasions, but what exactly that entails is a little beyond me.

The Doctor (Star Trek: Voyager)
The Doctor might be an Emergency Medical Hologram, but he's more than just a bit of hardware. In an attempt to build his own personality, he develops artistic talents and a holographic family, as well as friendships with his crewmates. He even writes a novel titled Photons Be Free.

Doctor Gogol (Mad Love, 1935 film)
Doctor Gogol is a brilliant-but, of course, completely mad-surgeon. After all, he's played by Peter Lorre, who pretty much invented brilliant-but-mad. Gogol is (madly) in love with an actress named Yvonne, and when her husband, a concert pianist named Stephen, has his hands crushed in a tragic accident, she comes to him, begging for help. He obliges by replacing Stephen's hands with those of a recently executed knife murderer. The results? Well, let's just say that Stephen and that kid from Idle Hands should get together and form some kind of support group. And Doctor Gogol? Completely mad. But also brilliant.

Dr. Cecilia Reyes (X-Men, Marvel Comics)
A Puerto Rican doctor, Cecilia has the ability to project a forcefield around her. As Wikipedia says:

Cecilia Reyes decided to become a doctor when her father was gunned down in front of her as a child, and she was unable to do anything to help him. The X-Men tried recruiting her when it was discovered that she was a mutant, but Reyes had no interest in being a superhero. However, when Operation: Zero Tolerance, a government-backed anti-mutant task force, targeted her, she was forced to join forces with the X-Man Iceman and other mutants to escape New York City and track down Bastion, Operation Zero Tolerance's leader.

Doc Benton (Supernatural, 3.15 "Time is on My Side")
When people started turning up with surgically removed organs and a dead man's fingerprints all over them, the Winchester brothers begin looking into it, as they are wont to do. Their investigation leads them to Doc Benton, a nineteenth century surgeon who discovered the secret to eternal life and now has a habit of replacing his parts whenever they wear out. Maybe it's not the best plan to win a guy friends, but it sure makes great use of his surgical skills.

Doctor Strauss, along with Professor Nemur (Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes)
Although nobody really remembers the name of the doctor who tripled Charlie Gordon's IQ, you have to admit that pulling that off is no small feat. Unfortunately, the effects are-not to ruin the ending-not exactly all they're cracked up to be. Additionally, Strauss and Nemur can claim the credit for one of the most famous mice in sci-fi.

Dr. Julian Bashir (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
As Wikipedia tells it:

As a child, Julian Bashir fell behind in school, and was evaluated as having learning difficulties. Because of this, his parents, Richard and Amsha Bashir, had him subjected to genetic engineering. The procedure made him mentally superior to most humans, and greatly enhanced his physical abilities. However, because human genetic engineering is illegal in the United Federation of Planets, Bashir and his parents kept his procedure a secret throughout most of his adult life.

Throughout the course of the show, he gets to do such exciting things as end up in a prison camp, see the woman he loves (Jadzia Dax) marry someone else, and attempt to integrate some other genetically engineered people into Federation culture.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Unlike his more temperamental counterpart, Dr. Jekyll is a well-liked, friendly doctor. The secret life he leads as Mr. Edward Hyde, however, puts that likeable reputation at stake, thanks to a potion Jekyll invented. Perhaps the lesson here is that you shouldn't mix your own drinks, even when you're a trained professional.

Star Trek rules the world of racial allegories with an iron tricorder. There's the amazing "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield," as pictured above - the Cherons are half black, half white, but they discriminate based on which half is which. They're such awful bigots, flames appear in front of their faces whenever they start running. It must make running a marathon kind of a challenge:



Also, in the book New Boundaries In Political Science Fiction, Wanda Raiford makes a strong argument that when Data is put on trial in the episode "Measure Of A Man," it's presented as a version of the Supreme Court's famous Dred Scott case, only this time the court rejects slavery. Also, Spock's "half-breed interference" is frequently brought up, holograms like Voyager's Doctor are discriminated against based on their photons, and alien prejudice is rife. As Tom Lehrer would say, "the Romulans hate the Vulcans, the Bajorans hate the Cardassians, and everyone hates the Ferengi."

Battlestar Galactica - the new version - also gets into racism with the use of the epithet "toaster" for the Cylons. As New Boundaries notes, Baltar's "Head Six" actually refers to "toaster" as a "racial epithet" and pleads with Baltar to stop Cally from saying it in one scene. Baltar ignores her.

Doctor Who's Daleks are basically space Nazis, as writer Terry Nation made clear on a number of occasions. In their origin story, "Genesis Of The Daleks," we see how the dark-haired Kaleds despise the blond-haired (or wigged) Thals, as their genetic inferiors. It's a "dislike for the unlike," as Ian puts it in the first Dalek story. So of course, the sneaky Russell T. Davies finds several ways to make the Daleks into genetic hybrids with other species, mostly humans, in the new series. Plus there are the Silurians, who refer to the humans as apes or ape-descended primitives.

The X-Men used to be an allegory about racism and the "other" in our midst, but these days it's more likely to be about homophobia.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham also has a strong eugenics theme - the survivors of some kind of holocaust are living in Labrador, and they're fanatically obsessed with purging all genetic abnormalities out of the human race. Like a girl with six toes, or the cool telepathic kids.

Blade Runner's Replicants are created for slavery on the outer worlds, and then hunted down and slaughtered by Deckard and his ilk. Like the Cylons, the Replicants are referred to as "skin-jobs," which Deckard says is a racial epithet. Since the Replicants can pass as human and anyone could be a Replicant, it becomes another fear of the "other among us," like Battlestar.

Top Ten by Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, Gene Ha et al. This classic comics series uses human-robot relations as a clear parallel for those between white and black people, complete with terms like "clicker," "spambo" (instead of "oreo"), and "wetware" (instead of "cracker"). Also, the Godzilla-esque monster characters have aspersions cast on their intelligence on a regular basis. The series is mostly presented from the perspective of non-robots and non-monsters, and we don't really get to know any robots beyond the stereotypes until we meet Ferro-American cop Joe Pi.

Legion of Superheroes. Over the past decade, this comic set in the thirtieth century has dealt a lot with anti-alien sentiment, which has posed a challenge for the mostly alien kids sworn to defend Earth. In the recent Action Comics storyline, the imaginatively named human supremacist Earth Man took charge of the Legion and banished all aliens off the planet, going so far as to suggest Superman was really always from Earth. This remains an ongoing concern in the Legion of Three Worlds.

Titan AE. After the world blows up, aliens have nothing but disgust for the homeless, destitute survivors of humanity.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As commenter DocWha points out, this show has been pushing the idea of "metal" as a slur against the machines pretty hard lately, including the variant "metal-lover."

The Time Machine. As commenter alphanumeric1971 points out, the whole Morlocks/Eloi thing gets pretty metaphorically charged. Mostly because those Morlocks are always playing their music and stuff.

Babylon 5 Similar to some other shows, B5 showed a lot of racial animosity going on between different species, although the series also deconstructed this whole notion in "The Geometry of Shadows", where the ethnic battle lines are totally arbitrary and change every five years.

Smallville: Kara Zor-El used the apparent racial slur "Red eye" to refer to Martian Manhunter in the seventh season episode "The Cure." Supergirl, how could you?

Heroes this season has pushed the "persecuted mutants" theme pretty hard, and Danko (aka "The Hunter") is a mouthpiece for all sorts of anti-mutant mutterings. They're taking our jobs!

The Teen Titans addresses anti-Tamaranian bias in the episode "Troq," all about the prejudice which Starfire faces. "Do you know what it feels like to be judged simply because of how you look?" Starfire asks, in one of the episode's more sledge-hammery speeches. Luckily, Cyborg does understand... because he's part robot.

Futurama. Everyone has his/her little prejudices - Bender dreams about killing all the humans, for example - but the only group that really faces institutional racism is the mutant population, which isn't allowed to go on the surface unless with special passes (which even then aren't always honored). Although they themselves hate in turn the sub-mutants who live in the sub-sewers. Oh, and Zapp Brannigan really hates the neutral people (but then…what does it take to make a man turn neutral?). Oh, and the Native Martians are a clear allegory for Native Americans, complete with being tricked into giving up their entire planet for just a bead (which turns out to be the biggest diamond in the universe, making it not such a bad deal after all).

The Animatrix – The whole Matrix origin story "The Second Renaissance" uses a lot of really obvious racism parallels to explain how humans and AI came to hate each other.

Planet Of The Apes. I can't believe we left out the 1970s' greatest racism analogy, until commenter UshaBibaculus pointed it out. Damn it all to hell!

Isaac Asimov. Some of his stuff about robots takes on racism overtones, but the condescension of space-going humans towards those still on Earth is way more blatant. Pebble in the Sky has some of the most blatant anti-Earth sentiment, as even the hero, archaeologist Bel Arvadan, considers himself quite progressive and would allow an Earthling to join one of his digs – as long as nobody else objected too strongly. Asimov's short story "The Martian Way" also shows how Earth sentiment against the colonists on Mars forces them to find fuel around the rings of Saturn. Considering the Earth politician who whips up public outcry against the colonists is actually called Hilder, I think it's fairly clear this goes beyond simple dislike. Meanwhile, in the real world, Asimov deleted aliens from his Foundation books entirely because he didn't want to deal with his editor John Campbell's belief that humans would always be superior to aliens, which grew out of his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority.

Alien Nation. After a bunch of aliens come to live among us in this TV series, they experience prejudice and mistreatment at the hands of the anti-alien Purists. The humans try to kill all of the Binnaums, the rare third gender which the aliens need to mate. Even the most sympathetic human character, Matt, turns out to have anti-alien biases.

The Green-Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. These books spend a lot of time delving into the mutual distrust and antipathy between the "fair-skinned, treedwelling Kindar and the darker-skinned, underground race of Erdlings" who live on the eponymous Green-Sky planet.

Wild Cards, created by George R.R. Martin – In a world where aliens test out bioweapons on humanity, creating fully superpowered "Aces" and horribly mutated "Jokers", both groups face bigotry at the hands of humans - although the Jokers generally have a much harder time of it, being horribly mutated and all.

Darkover by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In this series of books about humans colonizing the world Cottman IV after their ship crashes, the native trailmen and catmen face a lot of nasty prejudice from the humans.

Someone Like Me by Tom Holt. This book explores a post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of humanity spend all their time fighting evil, mindless monsters. The only problem with that is that these monsters aren't evil or mindless at all, but in fact just as intelligent and human (with all the attendant strengths and flaws) as the humans, which the human protagonist discovers at the end of the book.

Warchild by Karin Lowachee. Humans assume their alien opponents are mindless cannibals and hate them accordingly. Then the author explores the alien society, and the truth becomes far more complicated.

The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler. The Oankali find humans fascinating and horrifying, and they want to combine with us to create a new species - unfortunately, humans are also revolted by the Oankali, and have a lot of disgust for the half-breed Akin, the first person to result from the intermixing.

Astro Boy. As TVTropes points out, this anime includes robots comparing their planned robot homeland to Israel, and also compares the human treatment of robots to Apartheid. One Japanese robot flees to the United States after almost being lynched. (TVTropes also points to Bubblegum Crisis, Fullmetal Alchemist, Zettai Karen Children, Warhammer 40K and Mass Effect. I wish I'd found that page before we'd already finished researching this post!)

Mr. Show. This list would be hopelessly incomplete without the comedy sketch, "Racist in the Year 3000." We miss Mr. Show.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

The best television show endings don't just provide a satisfying conclusion to a serialized drama - they give you the sense that you've traveled, and arrived somewhere. They tie up at least some of the loose ends, and give some thematic resolution. But more importantly - they kick you in the ass and shock you. They make you go, "Wha? That's where this was heading?" By startling you, they make you view the whole series that's gone before in a new light.

Here are the top 10, in my book, from worst to best:

10) Doctor Who. By the late 1980s, the original Doctor Who had run out of steam, with silly storylines and weak production values. But the show's final season saw a bit of a renaissance, with a couple different storylines that addressed the theme of evolution in different ways. The final story, "Survival," brought back the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, and placed him inside a story about "survival of the fittest." Meanwhile, the Doctor's traveling companion, Ace, started evolving herself, reaching a kind of conclusion in this episode where she becomes more than human. The whole thing ends with a nice speech as the triumphant Doctor tells Ace they've got work to do.

9) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The TV series, encompassing the first two books, and several large chunks of the radio series, ends on a lovely note. Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are back on Earth in prehistoric days, and they get the question that goes with the final answer of life, the universe and everything... only it's slightly wrong. Still, it's a beautiful day, and they walk off through the prehistoric meadow as Louis Armstrong sings "What A Wonderful World."

8) Sapphire And Steel. A lot of this British show about two time travelers, played by David McCallum and Joanna Lumley, feels dated and slow now. But the final four part episode, in which the agents get caught in a time trap, is still as eerie and scary as it was originally. They're stuck in a roadside cafe where time appears to have stopped, along with a handful of people who claim to be from 1948. Normally, Sapphire and Steel can solve time-displacements just by using their wits, but this time they're out of their depth. "I saw the future... and it was our future."

7) Space Island One. This show about the crew of a commercially run space station had its ups and downs, but its last couple of episodes were among the best television I've ever seen. The company that owns the space station is trying to decide between shutting it down and just pulling the plug. And the station's best crewmember, Dusan, has already found a new job. But before Dusan goes, the company orders an unwise series of tests, which overload the station's equipment and cause it to go down in a blaze of glory, which not everybody survives.

6) Quantum Leap. Okay, all the commenters talked me into watching this finale, which I barely remembered. It's pretty great stuff, including Sam traveling back to where it all started and meeting a bunch of the people from his past jumps... And the bartender has some revelations for Sam that he struggles to take on board. So Sam makes one last jump, to the wife of an old friend... and you fade out to that message, "Beth never remarried. She and Al have four daughters... Dr. Sam Becket never returned home." Classic stuff.

5) The Prisoner. This is the most polarizing ending of them all - anyone who expected an actual explanation for the craziness which had come before would have been horribly disappointed. But anyone who wanted to see the craziness elevated to the level of Dada, and Number Six's latent egomania turned into the whole point of the series, found "Fall Out" an episode that just gets more rewarding the more you watch it.

4) Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is actually the textbook case of how to do a decent ending to a serialized show, and one that people reference all the time. After a couple of increasingly bland seasons, the show comes back with an episode that ties in with its original pilot as well as giving us a glimpse of the characters' possible futures. It feels grand and epic in a way the series mostly didn't feel after season five.

3) Babylon 5. Famously, this show filmed its Hugo-nominated final episode before the rest of its final season, allowing for some grand thematic resolution instead of a simple pay-off. "Sleeping In Light" takes place 20 years after the end of the Shadow War, and Sheridan is dying at last. He visits Babylon 5 on the eve of its decommissioning and destruction in a last blaze of glory, then prepares for death... except that a new adventure is waiting for him instead.

2) Blake's 7. Yet another show whose final season was drek, but then the actual final episode represented a huge return to form. Not only does the show's ostensible star, Roj Blake, come back from the dead, but we finally see a showdown between Blake and Avon, which seems to come directly out of all the mistrust and warped love the two shared during the first two seasons. You suddenly realize that, despite Blake being absent for nearly half the show's run, it really is all about Avon and Blake, the idealist and the uber-cynic. And it's never going to end well. (And for the record, Avon dies in the end. So there.)

1) Life On Mars. (British version.) I'm putting this at the absolute top because it redeemed the time-traveling cop show for me. Honestly, I was starting to lose interest in this show, even after only a dozen or so episodes. How many times can there be a crime, and Gene jumps to the wrong conclusion and tries to force it using barbaric methods, while Sam stands back and critiques Gene's racism and sexism? (And then, of course, the case turns out to have some connection to Sam's childhood.) I was dying for an episode where Gene was right and Sam was wrong. But the last couple of episodes totally redeemed the show for me, by asking: "How far will Sam go to get back to the present?" And then that turns out not even to be the right question, since the real question is, "Will Sam be happy when he finally gets back to his nice, sanitized boring future"? I have no idea how the American version will end, but somehow I doubt we'll see the American Sam Tyler killing himself, and it especially won't be portrayed as an understandable choice. Apparently this was voted #1 in a list of the 50 greatest TV endings. And apparently the show's makers just wanted to end it with him jumping off the roof.

It's pretty much impossible to discuss fictional archaeologists without talking about Indiana Jones, but until a year ago he arguably wouldn't have belonged on this list. If nothing else - and I'm pretty sure that that film didn't accomplish anything else - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull firmly ensconced Indy in the realm of science fiction. Which is probably a good thing, considering Dr. Jones is generally considered the quintessential fictional archaeologist, the iconic representative of everything alluring about the discipline - solving history's mysteries, going on exotic adventures, stealing priceless cultural artifacts...it's all there! That said, Indy can't really be considered the preeminent archaeologist in science fiction.

That title would probably have to go to Stargate's Daniel Jackson, who in his various incarnations headlined both the original movie and a decade's worth of television, making him arguably the most prominent archaeologist in all of science fiction. As a nice bonus, he even occasionally bordered on being a vaguely realistic depiction of an actual archaeologist, particularly when he used his linguistic know-how in the original movie to decipher the language on the other side of the Stargate. And honestly, who can resist the oddball charm of James Spader?

There are plenty more scifi archaeologists; in fact, far more than any one list can hope to capture. But here's a rundown of some of the most notable.

Doctor Who

Despite his stated policy of pointing and laughing at archaeologists, the Doctor does seem to spend a lot of time with them. If I had to guess, it's probably because nothing beats an archaeologist when you need to accidentally release an ancient evil. There's Professor Parry and his assistant Viner from the Patrick Troughton classic The Tomb of the Cybermen – I think you can guess which bunch of monsters they awaken (hint: it's not the Daleks). But nobody beats Marcus Scarman in Pyramids of Mars when it comes to unleashing evil; he lasts for maybe thirty seconds of episode one before the all-powerful alien Sutekh murders and possesses him.

The new series has only introduced one archaeologist, but Professor River Song is fairly important, what with her being the Doctor's wife and all (or not…I'm still not completely clear on that point). Still, she's not the first such scientist to play a major role in the Doctor's life – that honor goes to Professor Bernice "Benny" Summerfield, a hard-drinking, wise-cracking archaeologist from the 26th century. Originally created by new series scribe Paul Cornell in his novel Love and War, she both accompanied the seventh Doctor and had her own adventures in a horde of novels and audios.

Star Trek

Jean-Luc Picard was a huge archaeology buff, studying under the preeminent archaeologist of the 24th century, Richard Galen. He was even entrusted with completing Galen's final project, which revealed…well, I think I've dealt with that before. Picard also romanced the ethically dubious Vash, who was really more of a looter with a diploma than anything else.

Captain Kirk, on the other hand, showed no particular interest in the field. It probably didn't help that every archaeologist he ever encountered was a crazed degenerate with woman issues, whether it was Robert Crater in "The Man Trap" or Roger Korby in "What are Little Girls Made of?" It's almost as though the Federation's apparent policy of stranding one or two people on an uninhabited planet for years at a time to dig through the remains of a dead civilization was somehow flawed.

DC Comics

Want to become a superhero without all the hassle of locking yourself inside a nuclear reactor? Archaeology might just be the career for you! It's actually unclear whether there are any ancient idols in the DC Universe that won't give you superpowers. There's Carter Hall, who upon touching a stone knife remembered his past life as Prince Khufu and so becomes Hawkman. Rex Mason became Metamorpho when he was exposed to the radioactive Orb of Ra. The Silver Age Blue Beetle*, Dan Garrett, discovered the mystical scarab that gave him his powers during an excavation in Egypt. Adventurer Adam Strange was engaged in some archaeological work when the Zeta Beam transported him to the planet Rann. Sven Nelson died shortly after uncovering the Tomb of Nabu, but his son Kent would be trained by Nabu's spirit to become Doctor Fate. Oh, and the Tim "Robin" Drake's dad Jack was an archaeologist as well, but he somehow managed to never get any superpowers out of the deal.

*OK, technically a Charlton, not DC, character. But you get the idea.

Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds

In his 2000 novel, Reynolds follows Daniel Sylveste as his excavations on the planet Resurgam reveal newfound details about the long-dead Amarantin civilization. From this starting point, Reynolds weaves a tale of cyborgs, assassins, cosmic mysteries, and antimatter implants, all of which sounds pretty awesome. It's almost enough for me to forgive him for not knowing how to spell "Alasdair." Almost.

Isaac Asimov

Archaeology forms a pretty big part of my second favorite Asimov book, the criminally underrated Pebble in the Sky. The Sirius-born Bel Arvadan comes to the primitive backwater known as Earth in the hopes of evaluating the local claims that humanity originated there. Naturally, he gets a bit distracted by a plot to wipe out all of humanity and never does get round to doing any excavating. Which is why Foundation, set millennia later, finds the foppish Lord Dorwin blathering on about some very promising leads regarding humanity's origins recently discovered in the Arcturus system. For obvious reasons, this line of inquiry doesn't pan out, and shortly thereafter galactic civilization pretty much collapses, which I'm guessing led to some serious budget crunches in a galaxy's worth of archaeology departments.

Babylon 5

Ian McShane took some valuable time out from being a total badass to play Dr. Robert Bryson in the B5 television movie The River of Souls. Dr. Bryson brings an orb on board Babylon 5 that apparently contains a billion tortured souls. For some reason, the orb holds the secret to immortality. Either way, this is a serious enough situation that Martin Sheen shows up as a Soul Hunter to demand the orb be returned to him. This eventually happens, but not before Dr. Bryson and the billion souls team up for some serious havoc-wreaking.

"Omnilingual", by H. Beam Piper

This 1957 short story centers on the efforts of an archaeological team to decipher the language of an ancient Martian civilization, a task that at first seems all but impossible. They eventually figure out a road to decipherment with the discovery of some linguistic common ground: the periodic table of elements.

Saga of Seven Suns, by Kevin Anderson

The husband-and-wife xenoarchaeological team of Louis and Margaret Colicos accidentally set off Anderson's seven-book battle royale of elemental forces when they discover ancient technology that can turn gas planets into stars. This is great news for lovers of solar energy, but bad news for the super-intelligent, all-powerful aliens that live on gas planets (it's also bad news for people who don't want to be wiped out by super-intelligent, all-powerful aliens). Not the greatest advertisement for archaeology I've ever heard, really.

Futurama

I'm fairly sure we've yet to see any actual archaeologists on Futurama. If I had to guess, they're probably hiding out of shame at the general terribleness of their work.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Speaking of shame, the wonderfully, horribly Canadian MST3K entry The Final Sacrifice probably involved archaeology. The film isn't really coherent enough for me to speak with certainty, but I believe the father of hero person with the most lines Troy McGreggor got killed by an evil cult because he was investigating the ancient Ziox civilization. Although, on second thought, I think Crow and Servo clearly established Troy's father was really Miami Dolphins great Larry Csonka, who is not generally considered an archaeologist. Not yet, anyway.

There are plenty more, of course. Who are some of the biggest ones I missed?

Panspermia is the term for the most scientifically plausible version of this concept, but it isn't necessarily what science fiction usually presents. The panspermia hypothesis holds that the building blocks of life are not found exclusively on planetary bodies but are instead found scattered throughout the cosmos, and it is these spaceborne particles that are at least partly responsible for life on Earth. There's a little circumstantial evidence for the theory (although far, far more to support the reliable old "Life comes from Earth" hypothesis), and there is something undeniably fascinating about the subtext – the aliens are already here, and we are they. But science fiction barely ever depicts the actual theory of panspermia, mostly because it's just a physical process that takes billions of years to play out and is pretty boring unless you're willing to get really mystical.

What science fiction more properly deals with is exogenesis, which simply states that humanity or its genetic ancestors didn't always live on Earth. That generally means one of two things – either an ancient alien race introduced life to a previously dead Earth (sometimes as part of a larger directed panspermia project) or a bunch of humans from some other civilization colonized Earth, a fact that somehow slipped the minds of their descendants (you know…us). Plenty of science fiction deals with both, including two of the big science fictions works currently in the news. (The occasional spoiler may lie ahead.)

Outlander
One of the most satisfying little details of everybody's favorite Vikings vs. aliens epic is its answer to why Jim Caviezel's character, the alien Kainan, looks exactly like the Norsemen and how he can possibly speak their language.Outlander solves both of these problems by revealing Earth is an "abandoned seed colony" of Kainan's spacefaring civilization. Unfortunately, the whole notion that Earth was colonized by an interstellar race really opens up a far bigger plot hole than the one it was meant to fill. After all, Kainan's people would have had to have "seeded" Earth eons ago. If they could pull off planetary engineering on that sort of scale way back then, you'd think they wouldn't have so much trouble with a bunch of bioluminescent dragons. In the end, it's probably best not to think too much about the logistics of the whole abandoned seed colony concept. Because, ultimately, the very inclusion of the idea in the first place is, like so much of Outlander, awesome.

Battlestar Galactica
In both the original and new versions of the series, humans originally came from Kobol, the legendary planet of the gods, and Earth is just the fabled lost colony. The new series is busy dealing with Earth, so it's entirely possible a couple "What the frak?" moments still lie ahead that will reveal humanity actually did come from Earth. The original series, however, left no doubt that Kobol was where we all came from, as the no-budget god-awfulness that is Galactica 1980 established contact between the Galactica and contemporary Earth. Flying motorcycle chases ensued.

Star Trek
The Next Generation episode "The Chase" sought to acknowledge and explain the genetic improbability of a galaxy full of nothing but humanoid aliens with rubber foreheads. The solution – ancient aliens who, upon finding themselves all alone in the galaxy, seeded various planets with their genetic codes – is surprisingly deft, and actually turns a three-decade failure of imaginations and budgets into something almost elegaic. As one would expect, Picard takes this existence-altering revelation in his usual stride, while the Cardassians look a bit grumpy.

Stargate
Honestly, between all the genetic engineering, forced relocations of ancient humans, and universe-altering civil wars between godlike aliens it all gets a bit difficult to keep track of which species actually came from where. In short, a bunch of plague-decimated demigods maybe used this thing called the Dakara superweapon millions of year ago to shoot their genetic information throughout the Milky Way, which maybe had something to do with humanity's evolution. Or maybe not.

Babylon 5
Since we might as well finish off the sweep of nineties science fiction, the Centauri initially tried to dismiss Earth as one of their lost colonies. Sure, this probably wasn't true, but how else are you going to haze the new interstellar species?

Isaac Asimov
Most aliens seem to create life on Earth for slightly more practical (well, relatively speaking) reasons than the Star Trek aliens' "monument to our existence." Asimov imagined Earth as an eons-old alien experiment not once but twice – in "Jokester", the aliens did it to explore the concept of humor, while in "Breeds there a Man…?" the aliens are engaged in a more vague exercise in genetics. There’s also "Death Sentence", where an anthropologist for the Galactic Federation discovers that a previous civilization created a planet of robots as part of a larger psychological experiment. Realizing the Federation will surely have to destroy the planet as a potential threat, he decides to take his dire warning to one of the robots' biggest cities: New York.

Wildstorm Comics
The Kherubim people sent their genetic seed throughout the universe in a bid to conquer the universe without their genetic descendants even knowing it, which they then followed up by actually conquering much of the universe.

Ringworld, by Larry Niven
It turns out we're all part of a larger plan by the Pak race to create a galaxy full of ultra-lethal, ultra-intelligent superhumans. Apparently, the plan failed because there wasn't enough of the right kind of fruit.

Mission to Mars
In this Brian de Palma stinker, a bunch of Martians that didn't flee their dying planet shot the neighboring Earth – then a barren chunk of rock – full of the building blocks of life because…um, because they wanted to take Gary Sinise on a tour of the universe? (And that was probably the least nonsensical part of that movie.)

Salvage Rites, by Eric Brown
One of the very few times when a race made from directed panspermia confronts their creators, this short story finds a group of Benedictine monks in a cathedral-shaped starship seeking out what is, for all intents and purposes, God.

South Park
In easily the most awesome use of the concept, the anniversary episode “Canceled” revealed Earth for what it really is – one giant reality show. At least in South Park, someone is actually bothering to watch.

Starliner, by David Drake
In this 1992 novel, the narrator explains that no one bats an eyelid at botanists cross-breeding plants from different worlds because panspermia is "no longer a hypothesis but simple observation." Not the most earth-shattering application of panspermia, but still.

Ej-es by Nancy Kress
A rather less mundane spin on that same idea, as members of an interstellar marine corps realize a deadly plague on one planet threatens all the intelligent species in the universe – because panspermia makes them all genetically related.

Doctor Who
The classic "City of Death" features a more accidental case of aliens creating life on Earth. In the midst of all the ridiculously complex art forgery, random acts of violence, Monty Python cameos, and endless location shots that prove the thing really was shot in Paris, writer Douglas Adams somehow squeezes in the origin of all life on Earth. As it turns out, an exploding Jaggaroth ship kickstarted the whole "life" thing. That was nice of them.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Speaking of Douglas Adams, his most famous work envisions the noblest version of the alien-built Earth. Indeed, the emphasis here is on "built", as Earth is not a planet at all but instead a ten million year old computer program supervised by hyper-dimensional mice designed to determine the question to life, the universe, and everything. Of course, as is so often the case, this wondrous philosophical pursuit was interrupted by a bunch of hairdressers, TV producers, and telephone sanitizers from the planet Golgafrincham, who obliviously managed to replace the native humans and almost wreck the entire program. All of which rather neatly leads us back to wandering, forgetful colonists.

The Hainish Cycle, by Ursula K. Le Guin
In ancient times, colonizers from the planet Hain came to Earth and, for a time, coexisted with its native hominids. Whether the settlers ultimately killed the native Earthlings or simply bred them out of existence is anybody's guess, but the Hainish now consider modern humans their descendants.

Women of the Prehistoric Planet
This MST3K entry builds a whole parable of post-War American-Japanese relations around two rival alien races, time dilation, and giant iguanas, with plenty of sixties-era chauvinism left to go around. After a whole lot of silliness (as that previous sentence probably suggested) the marooned lovers Tang and Linda settle down on the titular prehistoric planet, which they decide to call…well, I think you can guess, but it rhymes with "Mirth."

Earthsearch
The classic BBC radio series had one of the best twists on this idea, as the four teenaged survivors of the massive starship Challenger search for Earth-like planets to colonize. It's slowly revealed that the planet they call Earth has some rather unrecognizable geography, but that the Earth-like planet they finally do discover, with its saltwater oceans covering two-thirds of the planet, sounds very familiar.

The Twilight Zone
But stories don't get much more familiar than the 1963 episode "Probe 7, Over and Out." Astronaut Adam Cook finds himself stranded on a faraway planet just as nuclear war is breaking out back home. He encounters Eve Norda, an alien who cannot understand his language. The pair ultimately agrees to start a new life together on the planet that Eve keeps calling "Irth." Judging by their first names, I’m guessing they'll do just fine.

Ain't It Cool News is reporting that the new movie, to be written by Babylon 5's Straczynski and produced by Joel Silver, will be a "companion piece" to, and "more of a continuation" of, the 1956 movie, including an appearance by Lost In Space star Robby himself, and complete with that authentic mid-20th Century futurist look:

As for the look of the film, it will apparently be an "enormous, giant, retro sci-fi movie"; in other words, they're going to implement the design of the original rather than attempt something modern. As Harry said, nothing "sleek or chromy" like Fox would do.

Between this, Star Trek's flashback to the '60s and the announcement of a new Buck Rogers movie, it's beginning to look as if the future is all about nostalgia for the Hollywood studios. Whoever is sitting on those Barbarella rights, it's time to get that movie into production as quickly as possible to cash in.

We've Got New Details On That Joel Silver/J. Michael Straczynski "Remake" Of FORBIDDEN PLANET! [Ain't It Cool]